Olympians Say Swimming In The Seine Left A Bad Taste In Their Mouths... Literally

Olympians who jumped in the Seine for this week’s triathlons are sharing some brutally honest reviews of the Parisian river.

The notoriously dirty waterway was finally deemed clean enough for competition on Wednesday, but several athletes admitted being in the water was still a less than pleasant experience.

“It didn’t taste great,” New Zealand’s Ainsley Thorpe told The Wall Street Journal. “It’s a little bit brown.”

That probably wasn’t the feedback Olympics organizers were hoping for.

Getting the river ready for competition has been a serious project for Paris.

After investing $1.5 billion into a system to scrub the Seine of bacteria like E. coli, the city suffered a serious setback when heavy rainfall flushed gallons upon gallons of wastewater into the river over the weekend.

France's Leo Bergere (left) and Great Britain's Alex Yee (right) escape from the Seine. Triathletes braved the murky river on Wednesday after poor water quality prompted minor delays to the competition.

The men’s triathlon was postponed on Tuesday in hopes of getting things cleared up, and by Wednesday the water quality was reportedly safe enough for both events to go forward.

Athletes tried to be positive about their swim in the Seine, despite the murkiness.

“Hopefully it’s all right because I think I swallowed, like, a liter of water,” Team USA’s Seth Rider told the Journal.

Fellow American Taylor Spivey told the paper she took precautions ahead of her dip, admitting, “I’ve taken lots of probiotics in the last month.”

Still, French President Emmanuel Macron celebrated the clean-up as a success in a post on X, formerly Twitter, on the day of the race.

“In the space of 4 years, we’ve achieved something that hasn’t been possible in 100 years: the Seine is now swimmable,” he wrote, according to a translation on the social media platform.

CORRECTION: A prior version of this story misstated the amount spent on cleaning the Seine as $1.5 million.