(Reuters) - French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday promised to take a swim in the river Seine one day, as he officially inaugurated the 2024 Olympic village and praised the legacy the Games will leave to Paris, including a swimmable river.
The keys to the 52-hectare village, just north of Paris along the Seine, were officially handed to the Olympics organisers on Thursday. It will host some 14,500 athletes and their staff before welcoming 9,000 for the Paralympics.
"You bet I will," Macron told reporters when asked if he would swim in the river Seine, which the city has promised to make clean enough for swimming by 2025.
"I will do it," Macron said. "But I won't give you the date, or you risk being there," he quipped, before giving a wink.
Paris has been working on cleaning up the Seine so that people can swim in it again, as was the case during the 1900 Paris Olympics. But a sewer problem last summer led to the cancellation of a pre-Olympics swimming event.
Macron is not the first French politician to promise to swim in the Seine. Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo said she would do so more than three decades after her predecessor Jacques Chirac famously promised to do it "in the presence of witnesses" but never did.
The comments came as Nicolas Ferrand, the general director of SOLIDEO, the company in charge of delivering the Olympics infrastructure, handed a symbolic key to the village to Paris 2024 president Tony Estanguet, officially concluding a seven-year journey since Paris was awarded the Games.
This photograph taken on February 29, 2024, shows a view of buildings at the Paris 2024 Olympic village on its inauguration day in Saint-Denis, northern Paris, France. The village, constructed on a 52-hectare site is located on a cluster of former industrial wastelands with the centrepiece being the Cite du Cinema. LUDOVIC MARIN/Pool via REUTERS
