Even though awful water quality made it illegal to swim in the Seine for more than a century, the Olympics pushed forward to hold all of its events in the historic Parisian “river” as planned. However, the organizers who chose to go on with the four open-water events did so at the expense of athlete safety. It is absolutely disgusting. All kinds of trash and debris make the Seine look absolutely disgusting and that’s just on the surface.

Paris’ centuries-old infrastructure is unable to handle heavy rains. As a result, literal sewage leaks into the drainage basin. Faeces carry bacteria, mainly E. coli, which seep into the water.#

France spent $1.5 billion to clean up the Seine for the Olympics but efforts largely failed. After months of controversy, and multiple cancelled practices due to unsafe levels of bacteria, triathletes jumped into the water last week. Belgian Claire Michel was hospitalized with E. coli poisoning after the competition. So clearly it wasn’t actually safe, even though it was labelled as such after testing.

Women’s swimmers were the next group of athletes to submerge themselves in the Seine on Thursday. They had the same issue as last week, where practices were cancelled on account of high bacteria levels, which created its own set of problems. 

Conditions were eventually ruled as “safe” for competition — but the participants say otherwise. They were equally as focused on not getting sick as they were winning. If not more so. They don’t even want to know what was floating in the water.

"It was really hard because we couldn’t really focus on the race. We had to care about the [water] quality, and what’s going to happen afterwards. We [had to] focus on not swallowing water and [being] safe in the race. I saw some brown things; I hope it’s not what I thought it was. I am concerned, but I brought some Hungarian palinka [fruit brandy] so I hope I’m not going to get sick after [the race]", said Bettina Fabian from Team Hungary.

Also, Katie Grimes from the USA said their first training session "got cancelled, and then the second time, we didn’t really want to spend too much time here, risking getting sick before the race. So I really didn’t get too much time in here before".