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- 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 postponed because of 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," Ainsley Thorpe, who competed for New Zealand, told The Wall Street Journal. "It's a little bit brown."
Jolien Vermeylen of Belgium told the Dutch television station VTM that she swallowed a lot of water and that it "didn't taste like Coke or Sprite," Metro reported.
"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, the US's Taylor Spivey told the Journal she prepared for the race by taking "lots of probiotics in the last month." She said she consumed a lot of water because of the river's strong currents.
And while the Canadian triathlete Tyler Mislawchuk made headlines for vomiting several times after his race, he didn't blame water-quality issues.
Mislawchuk told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that he threw up simply because he'd guzzled so much. "My stomach felt like it had a small child in there," he said.
A representative for Paris 2024 told Business Insider in a statement that "this project to make the Seine swimmable after 100 years is a major achievement — a project started 30 years ago."
The rep added that the venture would have "long-term benefits for the local and tourist populations as well as the river ecosystem, its biodiversity, and wider public health."