French Sports Minster Goes For Swim In Filthy Seine To Prove It's Not Filthy

Normally, when someone says they've been "swimming up a river of s--t" it's a figure of speech, but at the Olympics it could be the reality.

For years there have been plans to make the Seine one of the centerpieces of the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris with the river being part of the opening ceremony (boat parade; Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz) and even hosting some open-water swimming events.

Of course, the big problem all along has been that swimming in the river has been banned for a century because it's incredibly filthy.

So, the French government has thrown upwards of a billion dollars at making the river swimmable, with politicians pledging to go for a dip to prove it's clean, which in turn drew threats of mass defecation protests.

But one official — sports minister Amélie Oudéa-Castéra — drew the short straw and went for a swim, even if it didn't go 100 percent smoothly.

First of all, Oudéa-Castéra didn't get into the water too cleanly. If you have the world watching you go for a swim, item No. 1 on the to-do list is a nice, silky entrance into the water.

You want to glide in there like a greased-up Greg Louganis.

She did not do that.

And while the entrance wasn't flawless, I don't think she did a great job of telling everyone, "Come in, the water's great."

If someone is trying to prove to me that a river isn't filled with sewage, I would have a harder time believing them if they put on a full-body wetsuit and a swimming cap beforehand. That's what Oudéa-Castéra did, and there were just too many precautions, to make me believe that that's swimmable water.

I don't know what they're going to do about this Seine situation. Even if they got it clean, how are they going to make sure that a rogue sleeper cell of defectors doesn't roll in and drop their payloads in the water?

Unless they arm the gendarmes with pool skimmers and station them on the river banks and all bridges, I don't think there's any way to stop it.

Hopefully, for the swimmers' sake, the swimming events in the Seine will be relatively feces-free.

That's a sentence I never thought I'd have to type…

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