The Paris 2024 Olympic Games are to inaugurate the reunion of freestyle swimming in the Seine. Without waiting, a group of intrepid swimmers take a dip, defying the pollution and a bathing ban enacted in 1923. north of the capital, have never had a fine, assures one of them, Laurent Sitbon. And only once did the police pull them out of the water manu militari, he says, while his group claims to be “pioneers” of a pleasure forbidden for a hundred years: swimming in the Seine.
Winter or summer, canal or river, swimming is indeed prohibited in white water in Paris and in its inner suburbs. Thirty years after the promise never kept by former President of the Republic Jacques Chirac to bathe in the Seine – he was mayor of Paris at the time – only the prospect of the 2024 Olympic Games has begun to stir things up. Paris.
The State and local authorities have invested 1.4 billion euros in infrastructure and works to clean up the river, and thus allow the organization of Olympic events in open water swimming and triathlon. Beyond that, there are plans to open permanent sites for the general public in Île-de-France from 2025. “I can’t wait to swim in the Seine! It’s something other than a swimming pool…”, enthuses Céline Debunne, 47, at the idea of diving from a barge on Île-Saint-Denis, located downstream from Paris on a meander. of the river which then flows to Le Havre in Normandy.
To hear it, a large number of Parisians would widen their eyes. “The Seine has very bad press, like all dark-colored rivers. Color will never make people dream,” comments Louis Pèlerin, a 44-year-old swimmer. “People say: you’re crazy, you’re going to have pimples! sums up Tanguy Lhomme, who welcomes swimmers on his barge on this first Sunday of July. “As a result, they treat the Seine like a sewer,” he laments.
When he opted for this river habitat, in 2017, “it was out of the question for me to put myself in it. But my relationship (to the Seine) has evolved enormously since”, recalls this father of two children. At 8:00 p.m., around twenty swimmers jump into the water for a one-hour outing, or 2 kilometers covered in water that is neither cloudy nor clear, deserted by river traffic and bordered by banks with a rather bucolic landscape.
At 25 degrees, the temperature “is the limit for polar Ourcqs”, jokes Josué Rémué, an engineer by training and pillar of this group of open water swimmers who like cold water and usually have their quarters in Pantin, at the gates of Paris. They must go out with an inflatable buoy and in a group. The presence of supervisors also explains why these open water swimmers are “tolerated”, according to Laurent Sitbon.
The police headquarters did not respond to requests from AFP regarding the application of the historic decree of 1923 which prohibits swimming in the river. “It is not pollution but the control of morals which is at the origin”, believes to know Benoît Hachet, sociologist at the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS) and another swimmer in the group.
“Pollution is always a great pretext and often a great lie”, abounds Sibylle van der Walt, another sociologist from Metz, in the east of France, where she campaigns for the opening of bathing places in living Water. “While in the Nordic countries, you swim at your own risk, in France the mayor is responsible”, hence the reluctance of local elected officials, believes this 53-year-old German.
Laurent Sitbon affirms that there is an evolution: “There were only a few of us in 2017. We have the feeling of having paved the way a bit.” “More than the Olympics, it is global warming” which must change the “legal question”, assures his bathing comrade, Benoît Hachet: “In ten years, it will be 40 degrees. People will go into the water whether they are forbidden or not!”
