Games: Olivia Craighead

Are Olympians Going to Swim in Poop Water? The world's best athletes, ancient sewers, and the Seine.

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ON JULY 26, the opening ceremony of the 2024 Summer Olympics will take place not in a stadium but in the heart of Paris on the Seine. Boats full of the best athletes in the world will fill the river, gliding by some of the city's most historic sites, including the Louvre, the Grand Palais, and the bridge where I saw a crow eating a crêpe during my semester abroad.

Just before the Olympians reach the Eiffel Tower, they'll pass another monument of city history: the Musée des Égouts, or "the Museum of Sewers." Why, you ask, does Paris have an institution dedicated to its waste infrastructure with tours promising to "dive" "into the intestines of the city"? Well, the modern sewers date to the mid-19th century-they were part of Georges-Eugène Haussmann's renovation of Paris-and by 1878 they already stretched over 370 miles. Victor Hugo dedicated an entire chapter of Les Misérables to the underground network, calling it the “bowels of the Leviathan.” In other words, the sewer system is massive and old as hell. As such, sewage sometimes ends up in the Seine. And by sewage I mean poop. There is poop in the Seine.

That is nasty, yes, but it’s even nastier when you hear that the splashiest plan for the Olympics is that athletes will be competing in that water, which could absolutely make them sick. Both the swimming portion of the triathlons and the marathon swimming events are set to be held in the Seine. That’s a 1.5-kilometer race and a ten-kilometer endurance challenge, respectively, in toilet water.

Has France cleaned the river? It’s tried. Has it worked? Not really. Is this all going to be a huge mess? Bah oui. Almost certainly. The country has spent $1.5 billion on improvements meant to keep sewage from flowing into the river, but it hasn’t fixed the issue. Many Parisians would have preferred that money be spent addressing social issues, like the rising cost of living. And now, they are actually threatening to poop