PARIS — Into the valley of dreck dove the six hundred. Okay, not quite that many – there were fifty-five women who plunged into the Seine on Wednesday from the Pont Alexandre III. The call had come to their cardboard bunks at four o’clock in the morning: the scientists had counted the Escherichia coli yet again – une, deux, trois, quatre milliarde — and they had decreed in their white-coated wisdom that the hallowed French river, mortally poisonous just 24 hours earlier, suddenly was safe to swim and swallow.
Now it was four hours later and for the trim triathletes who emerged from the warmup room in the Palais Royale, there was no turning back.
“We do what we’re told,” the Quebecoise in the race would declaim when it was over. “When they tell us to go, we go.”
On the Olympic calendar, it was supposed to be the males who first took the waters on Tuesday, giving France a chance to show off its brilliance – imagine that — after so many years of municipal effort and the expenditure of so many billions of Euros and so much protest and controversy and the excrementally camp opposition stunt – which never fully formed, if it ever really was meant to — of “everybody shit in the Seine.”
But then, at dawn on race day, the river was deemed marginally too filthy for sport yet again, so they pushed the boys back 26 hours and made the girls go first, and this is why they call it toxic masculinity.
(Do not blame Theodore Escherich for this – he merely discovered and gave his name to the bacterium E. coli. A pioneering German pediatrician of the 19th century, Escherich lost a 5-year-old son to appendicitis and died at 54 of a broken heart.)
Into the impatient river, then, the women plunged at the stroke of eight as an insulting overnight rain, which had been flushing even more processed quiche and cognac into the channel, petered out and a sizzling sun poked through. Thousands lined the Right and Left Banks, hailing the thrashing freestylers.
There was only one Canadian in the field, a 28-year-old from l’Île-Perrot named Emy Legault, a bronze-medal winner in the mixed team event at the most recent Pan American Games who was ranked just inside the top fifty in the world coming into the Games. Legault would describe the aquatic portion of the swim-bike-run as brutal, the Atlantic-seeking current tossing the twig-thin competitors into each other as they navigated the pontoons and the bobbing Bateaux Mouches and the stanchions of the bridge that was named for a 19th-century Russian Czar, a good friend of France who, as far as I can tell, never visited France in his life.
After two laps of the world’s most historic sewer, Emy Legault was 35th, a full two minutes behind the Bermudan in the lead.
The women grabbed for their bicycles and, with an hour to kill while they wheeled and sprinted around the indifferent monuments, I walked toward the Palais Royale.
Guarding this pile was a lifelong Parisienne, age seventy-plus, named Denise G. who was proud to say that she never had set a toe into the fabled Seine in all her years. This was not out of fear of E. coli, however – Denise G. didn’t know how to swim. But she remembered when temporary ponds filled with river water were set up along the quais of her home town for bathers to enjoy.
King Henri IV did know how to swim, Denise was eager to tell me, and Henry IV “was the most beautiful of all our kings, and he had no shame, and he was a womanizer, and he loved to swim in the Seine in the nude!” But this was back at the turn of the 17th century and all that Henry IV got for his bravado and beauty was a dagger in the ribs.
Joining Denise G. in defending the palace from wanderers like me was the mayor of St.-Denis-De La Bouteillerie, Quebec, and this woman had swum just about everywhere – Senegal, Australia, the mighty Saint Lawrence out in Kamouraska where her little village kisses the southern shore.
This was Nicole Généreux, the eighth-place finisher in last year’s world championships for female triathletes past the age of – she wasn’t shy about it – sixty. She’s at these Olympics as a volunteer.
“If you are an athlete,” the mayor said, “you want to swim.”
“There are times you swallow water and you panic,” she went on. “But you have to trust the scientists. If this were my race, I would go.”
A few minutes later, on the Pont Alexandre III, Emy Legault finished in 35th place in the Olympic triathlon for women, right where she had started the cycling. France, Switzerland, and Britain claimed the metal discs. The Bermudan had faded to fifth. The men were just coming out of the Palais.
“As an athlete, you roll with the punches,” Legault said, with the race and the river behind her. “We don’t think about it. We just do what we’re told. Obviously, we talked about it, but it’s not our decision. When they say ‘Go,’ we go.”
Below us flowed the dark, uncaring stream. Now comes the waiting. We will know in a day or two if the white-coats were right and the Seine of kings and commoners, at long last and for the people of Paris, finally is clean, and to show the world that such a thing is possible, that the Seine is clean..