Paris 2024 Olympics and the River Seine – British chief on triathlon’s gigantic GAMBLE
With the top-tier short course campaign having just finished – supertri Neom wrapping things up after the WTCS Grand Finals in Torremolinos – now is the ideal time to revisit arguably the biggest triathlon talking point of the year. The water quality in the River Seine which so nearly turned the triathlons at both the Olympics and Paralympics in Paris into duathlons.
And it was far from an isolated case as numerous factors including extreme weather, climate change and water pollution have meant countless swims have been cancelled or changed over the course of the triathlon season.
Even this last weekend at the Women’s Collegiate Triathlon National Championships in Colorado the planned swim in Lake Louisa was switched to a 750-metre time trial swim at Clermont Watersports Park due to damage caused by last month’s Hurricane Milton.
But Paris and the Olympics / Paralympics are the sport’s biggest stage – by some margin – and questions remain as to the wisdom of committing to the Seine, with no alternative venue.
Plan B essentially was not to have triathlons but instead duathlons. Thankfully that didn’t materialise, but we came incredibly close to it.
The ‘product’ matters
No nation won more Olympic triathlon medals than Team GB, with Alex Yee’s gold in the delayed men’s race one of the moments of the entire Games. And they also excelled in the Paralympics, which also featured a 24-hour delay and all 11 races being held on the same day.
It wasn’t just the athletes who were impacted either – all the support staff and many more had to cope with late decisions and vastly changed schedules. So looking back, does British Triathlon’s Performance Director Mike Cavendish, who oversaw Team GB at both the Olympics and Paralympics, think it was worth the risk?
In an in-depth interview with TRI247 he said: “I’ve been asked this a number of times – whether it was worth it, whether the risk of the Seine was worth it.
“And my response is still the same. Obviously, we have to make sure that athletes are healthy and nobody will ever put athletes at risk.
“But the product, which sells our sport, matters. They pushed for it to be in the middle of one of the most iconic cities in the world and there was no other body of water they could have done that with in the centre of Paris. So I can see why they did it.
“Do we wish that we didn’t have the rain, we didn’t have the uncertainty and all those things, of course. But when you actually end up with the three brilliant races that they delivered at the Olympics, the brilliant set of results, the brilliant stories, I don’t really think triathlon as a sport could have asked for much more than what we got with those races in Paris.”
‘Rolling with the punches’
In terms of the practicalities how did GB – who have been lauded for their meticulous preparation – handle all the upheaval?
“It was pretty difficult,” admits Cavendish. “As you say, the uncertainty is the killer. Athletes are really preparing for a specific moment in time. And then when that specific moment in time is not when you expect it to be, that can really throw people.
“The thing we tried to do a lot in advance was tell athletes everything that we knew, so we weren’t hiding anything. Every little bit of data that we got, they knew about it. And we were trying to give them a gut feel on what we thought.
But we were guessing, to be completely honest.
“We just tried to prepare them to roll with the punches because we knew – and let’s remember, Tokyo was not too dissimilar – that we were potentially going to be dealing with changes to time, changes to date.
“But this was on a whole new level, particularly when the contingency that we ended up with of the men’s race being on the same day as the women’s was not one of the contingencies we were told about in advance!
“That being said, I think World Triathlon made the only move they could have done because looking at the weather, had they not done those two races on that day, then they wouldn’t have got those races in and it would have been a duathlon.
“So it wasn’t great. And I would imagine there’s probably quite a few athletes out there that will say their performance suffered as a result.”
[Photo credit: World Triathlon]
Not just Plan B
“I’d like to think that as a country, we probably handled it as well as anybody.
“We had done a lot of scenario planning of A, B, C and D. So we had various pool bookings, for example, that we knew that if familiarisation or races didn’t happen when they were meant to, that we still had somewhere that the athletes could go and swim.
“We had already thought about where we were going to go and take people to run and ride, to be able to get them out and away from our hotel because we knew things were going to be difficult.
“But the simple things like having to be up at 3am every morning to basically wait for an email telling us whether we had a race or not and then figure out whether we were going to wake the athletes up or not and tell them they didn’t have a race, it was very, very hard. And just from a purely practical perspective, it was pretty exhausting.”
Mike Cavendish (left), with Alex Yee, Beth Potter and Mark England, Team GB Chef de Mission for Paris 2024
‘Unbelievably unlucky’
Cavendish was also in charge for GB at the Paralympics just over a month later – so did he feel lessons had been learned by then?
Everyone had been told that decisions would be made by 7pm the day before, in contrast to the Olympics, but that wasn’t quite how it panned out, with another 3.30am meeting on Sunday 1 September announcing that all the already-rejigged races would be put back 24 hours.
“I think, to be fair to World Triathlon, they got unbelievably unlucky,” says Cavendish. “Now, on the one hand, you could say, you create your own luck. And had they not put it in a body of water that was so difficult, then they wouldn’t have had this issue.
“But up until the Olympics, they had had – or northern Europe had had – about its wettest summer. The entire Paris water basin was completely full. All the things that they put in place, in essence, were overwhelmed by this unprecedented amount of rain they had.
“Then it dried up, things were getting better, and then the rain hit exactly the worst night.
If you were to pick a day when you didn’t want the rain to hit for the Olympics, it hits.
“And then when we get to the Paralympics, things get significantly better. There’s loads and loads of dry weather, pretty much all the way from the Olympics through to the Paralympics. And then exactly the same thing’s happened – it rains on the single worst day that it could rain.
“So they did, I think, get pretty unlucky. And actually, again, to their credit, because we often don’t give organisers credit, I think they made the right decision in that they picked the only time that they could have picked.”
