Alice Dearing was told that her tumultuous experience in Tokyo would temper her in the heat of the Olympic Paris battle. The 25-year-old marathon swimmer from Birmingham became the first black swimmer to represent Great Britain at the Olympics last year, where she placed a disappointing 19th in the 10K.
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But Keri-Anne Payne, silver medalist in the 2008 Beijing Marathon in swimming, believes a crucial first Olympic experience, combined with an additional three years of training, will see Dearing challenge for a medal in Paris.
The 35-year-old, speaking of exactly 500 days until this week’s Games, said: The open water team in the UK is still a young team at the moment, but it’s really important for Alice to have that previous Olympic Games experience.
Considering it’s been such a weird year with Covid, I really hope her training has been more active this year. Preparing for the Olympic 2024 alone, in the infinity pool in your garden, when you’re a long distance swimmer, it’s really tough. But now, hopefully, she’s had time to work on her tactics.
“Between Beijing and London, I spent four years just racing as much as I could to literally handle the bumps. I hope this is what she took from Tokyo and it will inspire her to go to Paris.”
Payne came into the spotlight during the 2008 Beijing Olympics after winning the silver medal in the women’s 10 km. And just four years before the London Home Games, the 35-year-old has been hard at work to focus on her skills and popularize open water swimming.
Payne, speaking at the SportsAid Week event, added: I went out into the open water shortly before the Beijing Olympics and came home with a silver medal, she said. From that point on, it really cemented my open water status. I spent the next four years really honing my skills for the home Games, I want to be a home athlete, now I really know how Rockstar feels.
Unfortunately, I finished fourth in London, which was very difficult, but looking back now, ten years later, people still come up to me and say that because they watched this swim, I inspired them to do it open water swimming. To understand where the sport came from and where it is now, this legacy is probably one of my proudest moments to date.
Will people really be able to swim in Paris’ Seine river in Olympic 2024?
Paris authorities and Olympic 2024 organizers have big plans for the Seine – hosting swimming competitions on the river during the Summer Games and then opening it to the general public by 2025 – but how realistic are those plans?
Swimming in the Seine has been banned since 1923, when authorities closed the water to would-be bathers due to high levels of pollution. Since then, the Seine, although known for its beauty as it crosses the city of Paris, has also had a reputation for being cluttered and dirty. Despite this, the organizers of the Olympic 2024 Games in Paris hope to hold several swimming events in the waters of the river, including a triathlon and a 10 km swimming marathon.
The Seine will also play a pivotal role in the Olympic opening ceremony of the Olympic Games, which aims to have hundreds of boats carrying athletes float down the river, watched by some 600,000 spectators along the banks. In the past, people have tried to push for the Seine to be cleaned – former French President Jacques Chirac said in 1990 that he hoped to clean up the water enough for him to swim in it for three years.
This did not happen, but François-Marie Didier, president of the SIAAP (Inter-Agency Syndicate for Sanitation of the Paris Metropolitan Area), told BFMTV that in the 1990s there were only three types of fish in the rivers Seine and Marne. In contrast, there are now 34 fish species in the Seine and 37 in the Marne, showing the progress made over the past three decades in reducing water pollution.
Clean-up project
Despite the fact that the Seine’s quality has improved over the years, many Parisians still associate the waterway with bad smells, litter and dumped electronic scooters. According to a Slate report in 2021, nearly 360 tonnes of waste are collected from the water each year, which understandably does not make it very appealing for swimming.
Another problem is sewage pollution. According to Vivienne Walt, who covered the cleanup plan for Time magazine, Last year, 1.9 million cubic meters of raw sewage was dumped into the Seine to avoid oversaturating the Paris sewer network and flooding the city during particularly heavy rains.
To address this issue, the Water Quality and Swimming Program was launched for the first time in 2016, funded by the City of Paris and other local authorities with 1.4 billion euros. To solve the problem of heavy rains dumping raw sewage into the river, a large rainwater storage tank is being built near the Austerlitz railway station.
In 2021, the son of the mayor of Paris, Anne Idlago, Arthur Germain, an endurance swimmer, swam the entire length of the Seine from its source near Dijon to the sea at Le Havre as part of an environmental project. You can also sell your Olympic Tickets on our online platform xchangetickets.com.
If the water is clean enough, the Olympic 2024 competitions will be held there in the summer of 2024, and the next stage is the mass swimming, which is planned from 2025. The plan, which is still subject to technical studies, is to create 23 baths along the Seine, 5 of them in Paris itself, and the rest in the suburbs and surroundings of Paris.
Two Parisian sites will be located along the left bank of the Seine (in the 5th and 6th arrondissement), one on the edge of the island Saint-Louis (4th), one in the port of Bercy (12th) and one in the Bois de Boulogne (16th -th place).
These will be enclosed pool-type structures placed in the river to create bathing areas – like the temporary pool that is built every summer on the Canal de l’Ourc in Bassin-de-les-Villettes every summer. At this stage, it is unclear whether the Seine pools will be permanent or summer-only, or what the rules will be for swimming in the river outside designated pool areas.
But will it happen?
“According to the regional authorities of Paris, the stated goal of the water quality and swimming program is to reduce river pollution by three-quarters by 2024. in the Seine, said the prefecture of Île-de-France.”
There is reason to believe that the plan will succeed. In the summer of 2022, daily samples of the river water were taken and they were found to be ‘satisfactory’ or ‘excellent’ 7 days out of 10. And that’s before all the work started – Pierre Rabadan, Deputy Mayor of Paris in charge of sports, Olympic Games and the Paralympic Games and the Seine, BFMTV reported.
The head of the Olympic Organizing Committee, Tony Estanguet, echoed these comments, telling a French news channel that the test results for the summer of 2022 were very, very, very encouraging, this summer’s tests showed that we are already at a level that allows swimming.
Despite these encouraging results, the deputy mayor said hazards such as severe storms could mean the river would have to close for several days to reach safe pollution levels again. In this situation, the organizers will have a margin of two to three days to reschedule the events, Rabadan explained, referring to the Olympic and Paralympic Games.
Françoise Lucas, a microbiology researcher at the University of Paris-Est-Créteil, told BFMTV that for this reason we should hope there will be no rain at all during the three days leading up to the Olympic 2024.
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