When I took French in high school, my teacher had a poster on the wall that said, French teacher never die, they just go in Seine. It was obviously a play on the famous waterway the cuts through Paris and perhaps one of the few words I actually understood in that class. But it feels oddly appropriate decades later, as perhaps it best summed the experience of Olympic triathletes as they tried to get ready for their competition, which, against all odds, was held this morning, beginning in that very same Seine River. No one was sure if that was going to happen until this morning at 4 a.m., when World Triathlon declared that the water quality was in fact good enough to hold the swim portion of the event. Essentially, there’s a magical number – and I’m just stating the science here -- of E. coli colony-forming units per 100 milliliters, and this morning was the first time they’ve gotten under the mark since the Games began. Which means athletes could dive on it with less fear of spending the rest of their time in Paris stuck in the bathroom. That said, I’m sure everyone tried not to swallow too much water.
The men’s race was actually supposed to be yesterday, but the Seine wasn’t having it after a failed morning test. So decided to schedule both the women’s and men’s events for today and hoped clear skies killed off just enough bacteria to make today a go. Which is what apparently happened, assuming we all accept the word of the event organizers who simply said that the latest tests showed compliance with water quality standards. Sounds good enough to me. Which meant that the Paris Olympics got its triathlon events completed and avoided one of the most visible embarrassments of the Games for the French government, a reminder that after well over a billion dollars of clean up efforts of this historically polluted river, it’s was still basically a sewer.
There are a few obvious questions that pretty much everyone has been asking. First, why did they need to hold a triathlon in one of the world’s most well known polluted rivers? Why not use Lake Geneva or the Mediterranean or any number of bodies of water that aren’t known for their E. coli? Second, seeing this trainwreck coming for weeks and months, why didn’t they put in a contingency plan better than hoping it doesn’t rain again? And third, why didn’t the Games organizers have a backup triathlon course built in in the decade long preparation of the Olympics? And realize, they spend tens of billions of dollars hosting the Games, so a few extra police officers and road closures probably wouldn’t break the budget.
The answers may be just as obvious. For starters, never underestimate the multiplicative weight of bureaucracy in hosting an Olympic Games. While it might seem fairly obvious to the casual observer, moving through the onion of red tape to either move a sport or create a backup venue is like trying to plan a Kardashian wedding. And particularly given a French public that had grown weary of the Olympic inconvenience, the political resistance could easily overwhelm any pretense of logic.
Second, and perhaps more to the point, the Olympic triathlon as it was is perhaps a perfect reminder of the true meaning and manifest of the Olympic Games. See, most onlookers would address a polluted Seine River and an upcoming championship triathlon from the context of sport. In other words, there’s no real reason to play wait and see with the world’s most prominent short distance triathlon and instead look for a venue that would better fit this competition. But that’s not really what the Olympic Games are all about. Sure, it may be constituted with a long list of often esoteric sporting competitions. But in the end, the Olympics is a show, a giant spectacle meant to generate revenue through nationalistic athletic spectacle. That plays much better in the heart of Paris swimming through its central canal than it does in some glacial lake hours outside of town. And in that calculus, the answer to a polluted swim isn’t fix to the event. It’s to figure out how to make sure it’s still contested through the prism of global entertainment, where the Eiffel Tower looms in the distance.
Which is why when E. coli levels remained stubbornly high in the months leading up to the Games, Olympic organizers used a very different logic than the rest of us might. Because like my old French teacher, you eventually have to go in Seine.
Keith Strudler is the director of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. You can follow him at @KeithStrudler
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