The International Olympic Committee has announced a spate of new test events for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, including an open water event that will be held later this year.
The open water test race, known in Olympic parlance as “marathon swimming,” will be an August 5-6, 2023 stop of the World Aquatics Open Water Swimming World Cup.
The open water events for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games will be held in the River Seine near the Pont d’Iéna bridge, where a spectator grandstand will be built to view both the open water swimming events as well as several road events.
Most elite open water events these days are being held in rowing basins, man-made lakes, or other relatively-flat and controllable bodies of water. It’s fairly rare to see an important international race, especially an Olympic race, take place in a river with a current.
This means that the test event this year will be especially important for swimmers to become more familiar with swimming in a moving body of water like a river.
Even then, the flow rates of the Seine through Paris can vary dramatically depending on how much rain there has been, creating really unique conditions that will test athletes’ more traditional abilities in ‘wild’ swimming and adapting to race, day conditions.
That race will be one of five on the 2023 Open Water World Cup circuit. The 2023 circuit will feature a number of new, or long-dormant, venues for elite open water swimming:
- May 8-9, Soma Bay, Egypt
- May 20-21, Golfo Aranci, Sardinia
- May 27-28, Setubal, Portugal
- August 5-6, Paris, France
- December 1-2, Eliat, Israel
This further elevates the series this year along with prize money of $40,000 per stop, $350,000 of overall series prize money, and $15,000 of additional category money for special incentives (sprint leader, junior leader).
It’s nice that the Seine is now clean enough that this can be considered.
Folks will need to get their shots (jabs.)