Olympics in Paris 2024: swimming in the Seine will be “one of the events of the century”, says Amélie Oudéa-Castéra

Being able to swim in the Marne and the Seine is “one of the events of the century”, assured this Tuesday, April 23, Sports Minister Amélie Ouéda-Castéra on the occasion of the inauguration of a water station for rainwater in Champigny-sur-Marne (Val-de-Marne), a decisive link for the holding of certain Olympic events.

“We are ready, on time, at D-94” of the Olympic Games and “we will also be there for our legacy,” the minister said. Downstream of the rainwater treatment plant (SDEP) inaugurated in Champigny, the Marne flows into the Seine, where open water swimming events and the swimming part of the triathlon will take place this summer.

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The latter gives the organizers of the Paris 2024 Games a cold sweat, with the cleanliness of the river highly dependent on the weather: in the event of a major storm episode in the previous days, which would result in the mixing of rainwater and rainwater evacuated into the river, they could be exposed or even cancelled, as was the case last August.

The measures taken to clean the Marne and the Seine should also make it possible to swim in these waterways, something they can no longer do in the Marne since 1970 and in the Seine in Paris since a prefectural decree passed in 1923.

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The goal of the SDEP is to return 700 liters of water per second to the Seine, or “equivalent to an Olympic swimming pool per hour”, specified Olivier Capitanio, president of the Val Departmental Council, present at the inauguration ceremony.

With the Austerlitz basin, built in Paris and inaugurated at the beginning of May, the Champigny station, which started in autumn 2020 at a cost of over 53 million euros, is a major project. Fed by two water intakes, it is smaller than the Austerlitz (8,000 m3 compared to 50,000 m3), but has a dual functionality: storage, like the Austerlitz basin, and cleaning.

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Underground, two lobes with a depth of up to 20 m and a diameter of 35 m receive rainwater, one to store it, the other to purify it in three stages. First, screens to separate the waste.

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Then you put leaves to separate the water from the sand and mud. Finally, the site’s main technological innovation lies in the presence of around a hundred ultraviolet lamps to achieve, the operators assure, 99.9% healthy water, free of bacteria.