Women's 10km swimming gold medalist Sharon van Rouwendaal. GETTY IMAGES

The state of the River Seine was the most talked about of the competitions that took place there, the Triathlon and the Marathon Swimming. Dutch athlete Sharon van Rouwendaal and the Hungarian Kristof Rasovszky won in two very close races..

Since before the start of the Olympic Games, the eyes of the Paris 2024 organisers have been on the Seine and the quality of its water. E. coli bacteria were present at too high levels at several points in the river. Although Mayor Anne Hidalgo and other authorities involved in the event even took a bath to show that nothing was wrong, the contamination in the river has affected the athletes.

As the days of the Triathlon competition approached, some of the planned training sessions in the river were suspended. The same thing happened with the Marathon Swimming. The men's Triathlon was even rescheduled to make sure. 

Consequences after the competitions. In the case of Marathon Swimming, we have seen them with three sick German swimmers in the river, including the story of Leonie Beck, and also the Irish swimmer Daniel Wiffen.



As for the competition, the figure of the Netherlands' Sharon van Rouwendaal emerges. In Paris, she won her third consecutive Olympic medal. She has regained the crown she won in Rio 2016 and lost in Tokyo 2020, where she won silver.

Van Rouwendaal started with the pack, but it didn't take long for her to pull away from most of the field. Halfway through the race she took the lead from Australia's Moesha Johnson, and it was only at the end that she regained the lead under pressure from the Aussie and Italy's Ginevra Taddeucci. It was silver and bronze. Tokyo 2020 champion Ana Marcela Cunha of Brazil finished fourth.



Van Rouwendaal herself had joked days before the competition about the conditions they were going to have to swim in. In the end, she had no health problems and adds to a record of two Olympic golds and one silver, three golds, four silvers and one bronze at the World Championships, and eight golds, two silvers and one bronze at the European Championships, including 5, 10 and 25 km races and mixed competitions.



Hungarian double

In the men's competition, Hungary was the big winner. The fight for the medals was very exciting at the end. One duel for the gold and one for the bronze. The Magyars triumphed in both. 

Kristof Rasovszky had a very tough duel with Tokyo 2020 champion Florian Wellbrock from Germany. Rasovszky took silver in Japan. In Paris he wanted to be the leader at all times and control the race. With four kilometres to go, Wellbrock took the lead. But it didn't take long for the Hungarian to get back into the lead and the German went down. Oliver Klemet, the other German swimmer, went for gold, but had to settle for silver, coming in just two seconds behind Rasovszky.

David Betlehem was the other Hungarian competing on the waters of the Seine. He was always in strong positions, but not among the race leaders. He saved his best for last and beat Italy's Domenico Acerenza in a tight sprint to take bronze. The other Italian, Gregorio Paltrinieri, bronze medallist at Tokyo 2020 and who combines open water swimming with the pool, where in Paris he won silver in 800m and bronze in 1500m, finished ninth, behind Wellbrock.



Hungary was the only team to win two medals in this edition of Marathon Swimming. A discipline that has been Olympic since Beijing 2008 and in which they already triumphed in London 2012 with the gold medal of Eva Risztov. For the Netherlands it is also a successful discipline, not only because of van Rouwendaal's three medals, but also because of Maarten van der Weijden's gold in Beijing and Ferry Weertman's gold in Rio.