PARIS – The dawn rain slowed to a drizzle just before 8 a.m. Wednesday in Paris, just as 46 of the fittest women in the world trotted onto the Pont Alexandre III, descended a flight of stairs onto a floating dock and dove into the Seine, bacteria be damned.
After years of planning, construction of a $1.5 billion sewage retention tank system, months of jitters, and a final 24-hour delay as mother nature cleaned up the latest sewage overflow as best it could, this elite collection of Olympic distance triathletes did the thing that has grossed out pretty much everyone for 100 years.
Was the river clean? Let’s say clean enough, and leave it at that.
At 3:30 a.m. on Wednesday, Olympic organizers and representatives of a regional environmental agency, the City of Paris and the prefecture of the Ile-de-France region performed the test that the Seine has been failing since the weekend downpour that soaked the opening ceremony and sent untold gallons of fresh sewage into the urban waterway.
Unlike the previous three days, when organizers canceled two training swims and postponed the men’s race for 27 hours, this time the river passed the test. But, officials determined, with levels of E.Coli and enterococci under the threshold risk for bacteria, viruses and other diseases that…
