People swimming in the Seine, in July of 2024.Photograph by Raphael Lafargue / Sipa / AP

Skip the first half if you are short on time, but in the second half of this article you will find the fruition of imagination and courage we always hope to see more of:

The Unexpectedly Hopeful Paris Olympics

The Games have never lived up to all their ideals—some of which were dubious to begin with. And yet this year’s iteration, for all its flaws, has already inspired some positive change.

…Which brings me to the Seine. When the Olympics returned to Paris, in 1924, the swimming took place not in the Seine but in a pool, the Piscine des Tourelles. Swimming in the Seine was banned altogether one year prior. It was, after all, not merely a river but a road through Paris, crowded with barges. It was also a sewer, filled with refuse from houseboats and the untreated sewage that overflowed the city’s nineteenth-century system when it rained. Various attempts to clean up the Seine failed. When Paris was selected to host the 2024 Games, seven years ago, it was still illegal to swim in the river.

But the organizers nonetheless decided that they would host the marathon swim and the swimming portion of the triathlon in the Seine. To make it swimmable, the French government spent one and a half billion dollars in river improvement, building a water-treatment plant in Champigny-sur-Marne and a massive holding tank for untreated overflow water under a public garden near the Austerlitz train station, and establishing regulations that required houseboats to hook into the municipal sewer system. This hasn’t worked perfectly. After a particularly wet May, the office of Paris’s mayor, Anne Hidalgo, has acknowledged that, in June, levels of E. coli bacteria were ten times the allowable amount; a promise by the Mayor to jump into the water to prove its safety was pushed back. Organizers, who had insisted that there was no backup plan for the Olympic events, finally allowed that there were contingencies in place if contamination levels remained high, including possibly cancelling the swimming portion of the triathlon.

Drier weather since then has improved the water quality, and Hidalgo finally took the plunge last week—she declared the water wonderful, if a bit cold. (The President of France, Emmanuel Macron, has also promised to swim in the Seine, but not before the Olympics.) The idea of swimming in the Seine remains a huge joke to many people, but not to the Olympic swimmers. Some teams aren’t taking any chances; British athletes are being vaccinated for typhoid and hepatitis A, and will be put on antibiotics after the race. Hidalgo, meanwhile, has announced plans to construct three swimming pools in the river, which are supposed to open to the public next summer. Some Parisians have wondered who will actually make use of them, and whether there might have been a better use of a billion and a half dollars. In June, a protest-promoting hashtag, #JeChieDansLaSeineLe23Juin—“I shit in the Seine on June 23”—went viral. A Web site for the protest offered this rationale: “After putting us in shit it’s up to them to bathe in our shit.” The site also included a calculator for shitters to measure their distance from central Paris so that they could time their shits just right.

And yet. Paris is getting hotter; few Parisians have access to air-conditioning. They need a place to cool off. There used to be a handful of types of fish in the Seine; now there are more than twenty. “We want to make the reconnection of inhabitants with the river, reconnect the people with the water,” Pierre Rabadan, a deputy mayor of Paris, told Yahoo Sports recently. “With increasing degrees and temperatures, we need to re-create a refreshing point in the River Seine.” The Olympics, he added, are “playing a massive role in that target.” A sewage-holding basin is not as fancy as a moving walkway, as flashy as a Ferris wheel, or as fascinating as all the wonders of the old exhibitions, and a stretch of rain still might land a swimmer in the squats. But there’s something to be said for this struggle, much like there’s something to be said for the agony of athletes. There is hope in it…

Read the whole article here.