Olympic men's triathlon postponed due to river pollution | Hacker News Reader

Olympic men's triathlon postponed due to river pollution

theverge.com

45 pointsrntn22 comments

The local health and triathlon authorities here set an e coli limit of ~100 instead of the 900 in the article.

We have the luxury of vast amounts pf unpolluted freshwater however, so we can be more stringent. I can’t imagine many bodies of water in Europe have less than 100 units of e coli.

Where is here and why does here have cleaner water than Europe? We have great beaches and places to swim in Europe.

British Columbia. More mountains, less people = less pollution.

I get my water from dŵr cymru (a non-profit company), and they publish PDFs of their water testing -- as of recently every single test for bacteria, chemicals, and toxic elements come out at exactly 0. Out of over 100 readings, the average number of colioforms comes out at 0.01 per 100ml. There are no pesticides, and no trihalomethanes. Even ammonia comes out to 0.01mg/l (the legal limit is 0.5), which is startling given that this is coming from a reservoir that people can walk along.

Perhaps this is because of a coincidence, or perhaps this is because the company has one job to do -- one that isn't "make money for shareholders", but instead to "ensure the water is drinkable".

That's nice, but we're not discussing tap water here. Just about every open body of water has some detectable level of bacteria. This is normal, and a sign of a healthy ecosystem. Water utility companies then process and filter that "raw" natural water to make it safe for humans to drink.

The drinking water in Paris is fine. The problem is that they have failed to properly maintain their sewage system for decades and are still letting it overflow into the Seine river. This makes it unsafe for swimming at times.

Unfortunately you and other posters have misread my post.

The claim was "I can’t imagine many bodies of water in Europe have less than 100 units of e coli.", and yet, the open reservoir that supplies all our water local to me, that anyone can go to and walk alongside, provably has 0 units of e coli.

Either I'm a statistical outlier, or the supposition is incorrect.

This is difficult to authoritatively respond to without knowing the exact source of what you're talking about, but I suspect you'll find that those tests are on the water from the pipes, not in the reservoir, and that there are in fact processes the water goes through while being transferred from one to the other. They have, like, videos of it on their website, they're very proud.

This was so predictable, and so unnecessary. The Paris Olympics officials have known for years that there was no guarantee that the Seine would meet water quality requirements. They had plenty of time to select an alternate backup site near Paris. The fact that they failed to do so was pure vanity and politics. There are a number of other bodies of water that have hosted successful triathlons in recent years. The surfing events were way off in Tahiti so it obviously wasn't a requirement to do everything within Paris. I feel bad for the athletes who trained hard for years only to be jerked around at the last minute by lazy and incompetent officials.

They didn't not fail. They have alternatives ready. And second, the goal was not only to clean water, but to make it sustainable long term. That's a lot of work on the foundations. It is foreseen to end in 2025, and I'm happy they did it. For these games, they said beforehand, it's only possible if it doesn't rain much. No luck. But I'm happy they took on this endeavour.

The organizers absolutely failed. Practice swim sessions already had to be cancelled. Their "alternative" is to postpone the events to another day and there's no guarantee that the Seine will meet water quality requirements. The other "alternative" they mentioned is to cancel the swim and only do the run and bike portions. That would be completely stupid and turn it into a different sport (duathlon rather than triathlon).

Improving long term water quality is a nice goal but has nothing to do with the Olympics. Let's not confuse the issue and make excuses for laziness and incompetence. Competent organizers would have had a backup alternate venue lined up years in advance. No one should be happy about this failure.

I was in Paris a few weeks ago after days of no rain and stood watching the river from a bridge. It looked absolutely filthy - very grubby, with the occasional piece of rubbish floating by (pretty much what you would expect a river in a city to look like). And that's before adding large amounts of rain (which must increase sewage and farm waste flow into the river substantially). I suspect the river may one day be clean, but I think there's a lot of work needed upstream before it's ever going to be in a suitable, safe state to ingest while swimming.

I think the investments and political images generated by the Olympics are a lot (and I mean a lot) more important than having two dozen guys race to a line.

Clearly the actual sport is subsidiary to the overall nature of the event in the Olympics. That’s why everything surrounding the sport takes so much space.

But the mayor took a swim in it! That wouldn't be a load of horse shit would it?

It rained a lot after that swim.

Then I hope she swam again before the athletes took the plunge.

It's ok, they have a plan B, make it a duathlon instead of a triathlon. After all it only costed 1.4 billion euros to the tax payers, no biggie

It’s not like the investment will have been in vain even in the triathlon is cancelled. Paris would have had to make them to comply with the upcoming European regulation on urban wastewater anyway (ok they would have had quite some time to do so but still) [1]. Plus, if we ranked all the investments made for the Olympic Games in history by how useful they were, I’m fairly sure a waste water holding basin would do pretty well.

[1] https://environment.ec.europa.eu/topics/water/urban-wastewat...

OK, but then again it does not handle things such as... average rainfall

Building the infrastructure to prevent raw sewage from spilling into the river after rain storms seems like a worthy goal for the tax payers, regardless of hitting the Olympic deadline.

And it’s a goal of Parisian officials that has predated the Olympics by at least 30 years:

> In 1990, then Paris mayor and later French President Jacques Chirac declared he would launch a major cleanup of the Seine, and swim in it

https://time.com/6261729/seine-clean-up-paris-olympics-2024/

Sure, but as you can see it doesn't even work now that it's in peak demand, what do you think will happen when the Olympics are over an nobody talk about it ever again?

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