PARIS: A rehearsal for the Paris Olympics opening ceremony planned for Monday has been postponed because the river Seine is flowing too fast, city authorities said on Friday.

After several weeks of rainy weather, the Seine is currently flowing at a level five times stronger than its normal summer reading, meaning it would be impossible to “draw the most relevant lessons” from a rehearsal on Monday, the city authorities and the Olympics organisers said.

The rehearsal was to have featured around 90 barges which will be used to transport teams on their parade down the river in the July 26 ceremony.

Paris 2024 will be the first Olympics in history to take the opening ceremony out of its traditional setting of the main Games stadium.

The recent heavy rain in the French capital is also bad news for the ongoing fight to raise the quality of the water in the Seine to levels required to stage the triathlon and open-water swimming events at the Olympics.

The “very rainy weather” had caused “the strong flow of the river, which does not help to produce a good water quality”, the Paris town hall said.

According to graphs posted online, almost every day from June 10 to June 16, the level of concentration of faeca E. Coli bacteria was greater than 1,000 colony-forming units, the required threshold used by the international triathlon and swimming federations.

Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo has said she will take a dip in the Seine in the week beginning July 15.

Published in Dawn, June 23rd, 2024