The date of the inaugural dip no longer really mattered. It was to be on a Sunday at the end of June. The summer that never arrived and excessive river flow pushed it back the first time, and the snap elections postponed it until July. In the end, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo was beaten by Sports Minister Amélie Oudéa-Castéra to be the first politician to swim in the Seine, after Oudéa-Castéra made the splash on Saturday, July 13. Hidlago is now due to dive into the Seine after July 14, and ideally before July 26, the day of the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Proof will then be given that the €1.4 billion made available by the state and local authorities since 2018 has enabled the Seine to become swimmable again, a century after it was prohibited. Barring capricious weather, triathletes and swimmers will then be able to compete in the river in early August.

There will always be some naysayers who will reduce the scope of the event to a colossal expense for a simple sporting competition. They forget the European framework directive, adopted in 2000, which required that the general state of water be restored by 2015 (with a possible postponement to 2021 or even 2027). Having forced local authorities to correct the faulty connections of thousands of homes that were discharging their wastewater into the river, and to modernize their wastewater treatment plants, by the summer of 2025, it will be possible to bathe in the entire metropolitan area.

Thirty-two sites have been selected on the Seine and Marne rivers that flow through Ile de France. These beaches will provide both new leisure areas and cool pockets in anticipation of future heatwaves. The movement is not limited to Paris. In mid-June, the mayor of Charleville-Mézières in the north of France took a plunge into the Meuse river as part of the drive to reclaim it.

Placing the Seine at the heart of the Paris 2024 Olympics – with events at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, a nautical parade for the opening ceremony, a village built directly on the water – also has the merit of restoring prominence to a major infrastructure that has fed and heated (via timber transport) Paris, and welcomed the world at universal exhibitions, but which has been out of the spotlight as road transport has taken over. If France is to meet its decarbonization targets, the Seine should help accelerate the fight against climate change, while cooling the city. In many ways, the Games will have accelerated this process.

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