Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo should swim in the Seine in July, just before the Olympic Games (July 26 – August 11) and a year before the opening of three swimming areas in the river in Paris, she said. announced Wednesday.
In July, “we will bathe in the Seine”, she said during her greetings at the Town Hall, inviting the regional prefect Marc Guillaume to accompany her in this “historic dive”, “more than 30 years after Jacques Chirac’s promise. Already last November, she spoke at the Paris Council about preparations for the Paris Olympics and had arranged to meet “before the opening of the Games for a big collective swim in the Seine”.
In 1990, Jacques Chirac, then mayor of Paris, promised to “bathe in the Seine in front of witnesses” in 1993, but the ex-president never kept his commitment.
“Everyone said it was impossible, we did it,” said Anne Hidalgo, who announced, in July 2023, the opening for the summer of 2025 of three bathing sites for the general public. in the capital, at Bercy, Grenelle and between Île Saint-Louis and the Marais.
The announcement was made from this last site, during a dive by his assistants for town planning Emmanuel Grégoire and for sport Pierre Rabadan. But the socialist mayor did not take the plunge.
Swimming in the Seine, which was already practiced under the Ancien Régime, was banned in Paris a century ago (1923) by a prefectural decree, and a river brigade constantly patrols to prevent diving.
The Olympic Games must inaugurate the reunion of swimming with the Seine: the triathlon and open water swimming events will start from the Alexandre-III bridge which connects the Grand Palais to Les Invalides.
But the organizers of the Paris Olympics faced serious disappointments last summer during these test events. Before the cancellation of the two triathlon events (para and mixed), it was the open water swimming events that had to be canceled due to pollution caused by an unusual summer rain episode.
Since 2016, the State and local authorities in Ile-de-France have invested around 1.4 billion euros to make the Seine and the Marne, its main tributary, swimmable.
