In This Paris Suburb, Most Kids Can’t Swim—a New Olympic Aquatics Center Might Change That

21.07.2024 - 14:08 / cntraveler.com

This story about swimming in Paris is part of How Paris Moves, a series of dispatches about communities and social change in France through the lens of the 2024 Summer Olympics.

It’s another Friday for four-year-old Abdallah, and despite the April cold and fatigue of a whole week at school, he splashes in the water with about five other apprentice swimmers at the public swimming pool. But today is a special Friday: For the first time, Abdallah has managed to tow himself a few meters away from the pool’s edge, stretching his arms and legs in arduous breaststrokes.

“Look, he’s swimming! I managed to make him swim!” shouts Shirin Hogart, one of the swimming instructors. Two local mothers, volunteering at the pool and sitting on white plastic chairs, interrupt their chatter to applaud.

This is the typical evening scene at La Baleine, a public pool and centre nautique in Saint-Denis, the main township of Seine-Saint-Denis, a northern suburb of Paris. Here, swimming novices from the ages of three to 90 attend weekly group lessons. Abadallah’s achievement is particularly special in the department of Seine-Saint-Denis, where 75% of children don’t know how to swim before entering the sixth grade, and thus fail their school-sanctioned swimming tests. This is the worst swimming proficiency rate in mainland France, and a troubling one at that: Drowning is the leading cause of death by accidents among people under the age of 25 in the country.

It is no small irony, then, that Seine-Saint-Denis will host major events for the 2024 Summer Olympics—aquatic competitions such as diving, water polo, and artistic swimming among them. With currently just 39 pools in the department, Seine-Saint-Denis has only 645 square feet of swimming pools per 10,000 inhabitants. That’s four times less than the national average, which gives residents fewer opportunities to take a dip. “We’re in sclerotic territory as far as swimming is concerned,” says Henri Michel, head of La Baleine, meaning that the government actors have been unresponsive when it comes to supporting the local community. “But the Olympics will give us a boost.”

Seven swimming pools in Seine-Saint-Denis have been renovated for the occasion and to host training sessions for Olympians. The new purpose-built Centre Aquatique Olympique, across the street from the Stade de France, is the neighborhood’s latest addition, completed in April of this year. Beginning July 2025, it will become a multi-sports facility open to the public, benefitting local residents and addressing, in just one way, the decades-old concerns about underinvestment in the area. As for that aquatic irony, Stéphane Troussel, the president of the general and departmental council of Seine-Saint-Denis, put