With only 88 days left before the 2024 Paris Olympics, the people of Paris are still fighting passionately against the "stinking ditch of the Seine".
As a venue for marathon swimming, triathlon and Paralympic triathlons, the sanitary situation of the Seine is still worrying, with garbage floating on the river from time to time, excessive E. coli... It is difficult to say whether the Olympic events will be held normally.
At the end of last year, France experienced its worst rainfall in more than 20 years, with sewers flooding, old urban drainage systems failing, and rainwater mixed with all kinds of garbage rushing down the Seine.
As a result, the water quality of the Seine, which is already difficult to describe, has deteriorated.
Although 1.4 billion euros have been invested in preparing to clean up the river and build a sewage treatment system for the Olympics, four months have passed in 2024, and the Seine has not yet reached its ideal state.
After all, swimming in the Seine has been banned for 100 years due to water quality problems, and it may not be so fast to solve the problem in one fell swoop...
(along the river)
Not only the official efforts, but also the private sector have actively helped to clean up the Seine.
The Seine Kayak Club took on the glorious task of cleaning up the river by making nylon socks into nets and strapping them around the sides of the kayaks, scooping up all sorts of plastic debris and daily debris that washes up the river when it rains, and sending the collected items for a bacterial level test.
(Kayakers show collected garbage)
The test results have been less encouraging. French authorities have warned that levels of bacteria (including "fecal contamination") in the river remain well above normal levels, and that E. coli levels exceed swimming safety levels by 1.5 times.
Estanguet, president of the Paris Olympic Organizing Committee, said that although the current Seine River is not good, he believes that the Seine River will be able to be used normally for the competition at that time.
But... You can't say too much... Estangue himself admits that if the pollution level is too high, the swimming stage of the triathlon could be canceled.
The reason why even the president of the Olympic Organizing Committee is not confident is that the French cannot predict whether God will reward him or not: if the sun is abundant, the river flow is low, and it does not rain for two or three weeks, the Seine can have better water quality.
On the contrary, if the weather is not beautiful, even a light rain will cause the Seine to experience another wave of sewage baptism, and then it will be the players from all over the world who are "fighting bravely" in the water...
Itching and mild infections are just a small matter, and if you encounter a disease-causing strain, you can have diarrhea, norovirus infection, and even life-threatening.
(Seine race in promotional image)
Of course, at this stage, the French have not yet raised the white flag and surrendered, after all, 1.4 billion euros have to be smashed into it, how can it make some results.
French President Emmanuel Macron and Paris Mayor Ana Hidalgo have packed tickets and promised to swim in the river themselves to prove that the river is clean enough to welcome athletes from all over the world.
What do you say... If these two get sick after swimming, the whole world won't be able to laugh...
It's not enough to have a bad sewage problem, there are many more things to face at the Paris Olympics, the most frequently mentioned of which are the various strikes in France.
Eiffel Tower employees went on strike in February to protest the Eiffel Tower's mismanagement and operations. Tourists can't get in after booking tickets, vendors can't sell things and lose money, but the employees are determined to close the Eiffel Tower for a week.
On April 10, the CGT announced that 5.7 million public employees, including national civil servants, local civil servants, and medical officials, could go on strike for five months from April 15 to September 15.
The strike perfectly covers the time of the Olympics, from 26 July to 11 August, and the Paralympic Games from 28 August to 8 September. The French government has been working hard to reach a pay deal to avoid possible strike action to come.
The union leaders, however, did not panic, and when they realized that the strike could affect the Olympics and disgrace France in front of the whole world, they were happy: I will take the money for the country's disgrace, and it would be better if I could use this to force a more suitable pay deal.
Paris Mayor Ana Hidalgo has warned that if the strike continues, much of the new Olympic infrastructure "will not be ready in time" and will have to take urgent action.
And yet... Even the Paris police threatened to strike - "if you want to take urgent action, you are free". The French mainly play a situation that is not chaotic, and if it is pressed too tightly, it will be rotten, and it is true that the essence of the strike is understood.
The mess on the French side has not yet been figured out, and the EU has begun to force European farmers to strike again.
Farmers in many European countries are dissatisfied with the government's reduction of agricultural subsidies and the EU's green transformation policy, saying that these policies have led to an increase in agricultural transportation and production costs, and a compression of profit margins.
Naturally, the strike wave also spread to France, and the French peasants implemented the idea of "the countryside surrounding the city", driving tractors on the highway and completely blocking the road, so that Paris could try the "taste of starvation".
The French government had to temporarily compromise and announce a series of emergency measures to ease the financial pressure on farmers.
However, as the union said, "there is a huge anger in this country, which can erupt at any time", and although there will always be a time when the strikes will stop, there may be a big explosion during the Olympics.
In addition to the strike, we have to talk about the sanitation problem in Paris, which is "on an equal footing" with the dirty water of the Seine.
At the end of 2023, bed bugs have been raging in Paris, and despite the French government's efforts to eradicate them, there are fears of a repeat of the same mistakes.
Rats are also a long-standing problem, and Paris has had to discuss "coexistence of humans and rats" because it cannot manage 6 million rats, which has caused strong public opposition. With bin cleaners on regular strikes, the increase in rat populations is a concern that has to be considered.
In addition, there are also media concerns that piles of foul-smelling garbage are likely to reappear during the Olympics, and that too few public toilets will cause people to defecate on public streets...
After all, everyone has seen the garbage piled up in Paris, and the dirty and sloppy "black history of the cityscape" has become the mark of Paris.
Some news about the Paris Olympics also gives people a sense of crisis of the "grass stage team".
At the end of February this year, laptops and two USB sticks, which contained the security plan for this year's Paris Olympics, were stolen from a train in France. Netizens ridiculed that the level of security that can't even be maintained by the security plan is really unbearable.
The construction of the Olympic Village is also "frequent": first announced that it will use cardboard beds like the Tokyo Olympics, and then announced that it will not install air conditioning in order to reduce carbon emissions... Inexplicably, there is a kind of courage to save anything for the sake of environmental protection...
I always feel that after watching all kinds of things in the Paris Olympics, I have a sense of immediacy about the Tokyo Olympics that year.
The suicide scandal of high-ranking officials, the triathlon race in sewage caused the runners to vomit, the cardboard bed in the Olympic Village was directly crushed, and the opening ceremony of the underworld was scolded miserably... The script of the Tokyo Olympics is still vivid, and in a blink of an eye, Paris has already begun to "copy and paste" the plot of Tokyo?
However, in the past, at least the French are still working hard to do this, such as the recent announcement of the use of recyclable plastic waste to make stadium seats, the construction of an environmentally friendly and easy-to-use black technology purple runway, and the transformation of the 1.4 billion sewage system in Paris is still being promoted...
I hope that everything will go well in this Olympics, and there will be less psychedelic operation of the grass platform team, so that the athletes who have been preparing for the competition for many years can compete with peace of mind...