[Example] The Seine may determine athletes’ success at the Paris Olympics

“I was born on a boat,” says Jacky Delannoy, a 66-year-old captain, standing on the bridge of a container ship moored to the Paris dock. “My Mum couldn’t get ashore in time, so I was born aboard.” The fourth generation of bargemen in his family, Mr Delannoy is at the helm of a 135-metre-long container ship, longer than a football pitch. Part of a fleet belonging to Sogestran, a logistics firm, it journeys each day up and down the Seine between Paris and Le Havre, a port on the Atlantic coast. Heading downstream, the ship’s hotch-potch containers carry cars, cement, champagne, furniture, wine and more.

During the opening ceremony of the Olympic games on July 26th, the spectacle will require no manufactured decor; the athletes no unnatural parade route. The Seine will be the stage, Paris the enchanting backdrop. The river, winding its way 777km from a plateau in Burgundy (of which 13km flow through Paris), will carry national teams aboard a flotilla of boats—past bridges, monuments and cobbled quaysides that lend the French capital its charisma. Later hundreds of athletes will plunge into the river for both triathlon and swimming races.

The Seine has long lapped at the imaginations of film-makers, painters, poets and writers. In his poem “Le Pont Mirabeau” (“The Mirabeau Bridge”) Guillaume Apollinaire compares the movement of the Seine to time and past love. Often the river is seen as a woman: “la” Seine in French, an enchantress or seducer. Many writers treat it as the essence of Paris. In “The Masterpiece”, a novel published in 1886, Emile Zola describes the “soul of the great city, rising from the waters”, which “wrapped” the lovers in his novel, Claude and Christine, in tenderness.

The dark murky depths of the Seine, and the cobbled quays that pass under its shadowy bridges, evoke concern, too. In “Under Paris”, a new thriller streaming on Netflix, killer sharks that have bred in the catacombs escape to feast on triathlon swimmers in the river. (Real-life contestants will not want to watch it before they compete; the Seine’s water quality is enough cause for fear.)

Everyone who has heard of Paris knows the Seine, but not everyone is aware that it is also a working river. Albert Marquet, an early 20th-century French artist, painted barges filled with coal, wood and wine moored along the Paris quays. Before the second world war, over three times more goods were transported along the Seine than is the case today. But the flow is still impressive: in 2023 18m tonnes of goods made their way by the river.

In recent years Paris has been at the forefront of trying to rethink city transport and coax drivers off the roads. Yet the Seine often gets overlooked in that endeavour. For all the vessels that chug their way along the river, it could bear many more, and the city could be greener for it, says Stéphane Raison, director of Haropa, a firm that links the ports of Paris, Rouen and Le Havre; he thinks it is possible “to create a green corridor” along the river.

Upstream, in the shadow of the modernist Ministry of Finance, the Port de Bercy and its former warehouses were once the country’s wine-distribution centre. Today the dock at Bercy is mostly quiet; the wine trade packed up half a century ago. A couple of skateboarders practise kick-turns under a nearby bridge. Yet, on the quayside, a row of vans await the delivery of crates of pre-prepared IKEA orders—flat-packs, rugs, kitchen sinks, armchairs—which arrive by barge at 5am each morning. “Your package has been on a cruise!” announces an IKEA advertisement. Since 2022 the Swedish furniture giant has been ferrying online orders there by river, and onwards by electric vehicle for home delivery in Paris.

Different users of the River Seine today, though, collide in their expectations. The City of Light draws tourists seeking to conjure romance and delight from unspoilt views. Too many hulking cargo barges, motoring at a fair clip past Notre Dame or under the Pont des Arts, may intrude. On a recent weekday, one ran aground off the Ile Saint-Louis, mobilising a flotilla of river-police boats, divers and a fire brigade. An ambitious expansion of river trade could pit culture against commerce, aesthetics against function, environmental conservation against economic renewal.

This is partly a debate about how the river looks, and who can use its banks. Downstream, at Gennevilliers, on the capital’s north-western outskirts, the Port de Paris is a vast, humming six-basin port run by Haropa. Approached from the river, it is largely hidden behind banks of reeds and grasses. But in the face of fresh demands, the smaller docks that abruptly punctuate the central Paris riverscape are having to plant saplings and widen access at weekends. Joggers, walkers and cyclists, as well as evening revellers, have recolonised the quays of Paris, where cars once sped along expressways.

It is also a matter of the water’s past use. Pollution from industrial activity has left a dirty legacy. Swimming in the Seine has been banned since 1923. More important, during heavy rainfall, overflowing creaky old sewage systems that spill human faecal matter into the river have, until this year, rendered the Seine untouchable. Despite a clean-up effort, in 2023 the city had to cancel various swimming trials due to unsafe levels of E. coli and other bacteria. According to World Triathlon, a governing body, swimmers can take part only if the level of E. coli does not exceed 900 colony-forming units per 100ml.

Water tested as recently as early July in the Seine showed levels higher than this. But the races are due to go ahead as planned. This is mainly thanks to recent clement weather and the construction of an immense underground overflow wastewater storage basin in eastern Paris that started operating in May, part of a broader effort to make the river swimmable, at a cost of over €1.4bn ($1.5bn).

Over the centuries the Seine has stirred the heart, inspired the imagination and repelled invaders; it has been fortified, channelled, embanked. Despite barrages, it still floods, bringing debris swirling along its course. The Seine is “an elusive companion”, writes Elaine Sciolino, in a book about the river. Shimmering at night, it turns by day from “molasses to pewter, from emerald to celadon”. Today the river represents perhaps above all an effort to help the city breathe. Even the fish are back. Recently 32 species have been logged, including eel, trout, roach, pike and catfish, up from just three in the 1970s.

Downstream from the Paris docks, brutalist concrete towers give way to wooded banks. Captain Delannoy navigates his container ship towards the lock at Chatou, past cormorants and swans, houseboats and parks. Curious passers-by on the riverbank stop to watch. Once the captain briefly tried the land-borne life, but could not adjust. The Seine, for him, is “freedom”. And there is space for everyone on it, he thinks. “Water,” he says, “is life.” ■