Paris Mayor Follows Through With Commitment To Swim In Filthy Seine

I bet that sometimes being in politics feels like swimming up a river of feces, but for the Mayor of Paris that couldn't have been more the case.

It was a swim that was years in the making, but Mayor Anne Hidalgo was true to her word and Wednesday she threw down some freestyle strokes in the Seine, just a week and a half before the opening ceremonies of the 2024 Summer Olympics in her city and about a week after the nation's sports minister did the same.

The river has been closed to swimmers for more than a century because it was too filthy. However, Olympic organizers plan to use it for the opening ceremonies, as well as some open-water swimming events, so cleaning up the river was in order.

Of course, cleaning a river so rancid no one has been able to swim in it for over a century will come at a price, and that price was over a billion dollars, something that outraged some people in France.

Some of those who were upset even pledged to poop in the river while the mayor was swimming in it which led Hidalgo to scrap her initial swim plans.

But, she got in there eventually, and so far there haven't been any reports of angry Parisians dropping chocolate croissants in the river, if you catch my drift.

This is good because Hidalgo really risked it all and opened her mouth while swimming in the river.

"It's very pleasant," she said. "It doesn't have any taste of mud at all."

Why even taste it? Just keep that mouth closed, Anne; you don't need to savor the water like a fine Bordeaux.

But hey she did, and whether that's because it really is squeaky clean (I'd be skeptical of that) or because it was an act of political face-saving, the optics are good as the Olympics get underway later this month.