- Olympians finally swam in the Seine after months of hype and speculation.
- "It didn't taste great," one triathlete told The Wall Street Journal. "It's a little bit brown."
- Paris 2024 said making the Seine swimmable was "a major achievement."
Following a $1.5 billion investment that's been met with some suspicion, Olympians finally swam in the Seine on Wednesday — after the men's event was initially postponed due to high E. coli levels.
Both the men's and women's triathlons took place in the iconic river, where swimming has been barred for roughly a century.
Some athletes said they prepped with probiotics, while others complained about the inevitable gulps they got.
"It didn't taste great," New Zealand triathlete Ainsley Thorpe told The Wall Street Journal. "It's a little bit brown."
Another Olympian, Jolien Vermeylen of Belgium, told Dutch television station VTM that she'd swallowed a lot of water, and it "didn't taste like Coke or Sprite," Metro reports.
"While swimming under the bridge, I felt and saw things that we shouldn't think about too much," Vermeylen told VTM, per Metro.
Like Vermeylen, a US triathlete Taylor Spivey told the Journal she'd prepared for the race by taking "lots of probiotics in the last month." She said she consumed a lot of water due to the river's strong currents.
And while Canadian triathlete Tyler Mislawchuk made headlines for vomiting multiple times after his race, he didn't blame Seine water quality issues.
Mislawchuk told the CBC he threw up simply because he'd guzzled so much: "My stomach felt like it had a small child in there," he said.
"This project to make the Seine swimmable after 100 years is a major achievement — a project started 30 years ago," a rep for Paris 2024 told Business Insider in a statement.
The rep added the venture "will have long-term benefits for the local and tourist populations as well as the river ecosystem, its biodiversity, and wider public health."
