“Strikes at the Olympics are useless.” Interview with Olympic champion Ilchenko – on the boycott of competitions in the Seine and the expulsion of Russians

The Paris Olympics are accompanied by scandalous stories every day. One of them is the polluted Seine River, where athletes compete for prizes in triathlons and open water swimming. French authorities spent €1.4 billion to clean up the Seine, but athletes were still infected with E. coli.

The first female champion in the history of the Olympic Games over a distance of ten kilometers in open water, Larisa Ilchenko, in an interview with , spoke about the two victories at the Games of Sharon van Rauwendaal from the Netherlands, the opportunities of the Russians to show a high result in Paris, the polluted Seine and the probable boycott of swimming by athletes for the sake of their own health.

— Van Rauwendaal became a double Olympic champion. How would you assess his achievement?

– Congratulations to her! She is a hard worker, well done – she deserves the victory! I just saw a funny photo of her with a dog paw tattoo, so she was not the only one at these Olympics (smiles). I remember how Sharon trained during the difficult times when there was COVID-19, she had to train in a three-meter-wide frame pool. And she still found the strength not to stop training, but to continue preparing.

In Paris, the competition was quite tough; the current Olympic champion and multiple world champion Ana Marcela Cunha competed. It was a very worthy battle. It is a pity that our athletes were not seen at the Games. And I do not think we will see it in the near future. This road is closed to us for now.

— A theoretical question. What could the Russians claim in Paris if they went to the Games?

— Our sport is very difficult to predict; it is not classical swimming, where you can count on seconds. For example, we understand that Evgenia Chikunova swam the 100m breaststroke in a 50-meter pool and showed a better result than the Olympic champion from Paris, although there is a psychological point here: each athlete approaches the final at the World Championships and the Olympic Games differently, sometimes it is urgent.

And in open water it is impossible to predict anything. The conditions are new every time: current, water temperature, contact wrestling, which sometimes disrupts the rhythm. Given the strong competition among women and men in open water swimming, we can only assume and hope that our guys will be able to compete somewhere. It is stupid to try to compare even the results posted at the Russian Championships with the times of the World Championships and the Olympic Games in this discipline – completely different conditions.

— Would you do anything to compete for medals?

“I am absolutely sure that the guys would do everything possible to compete for medals.” They are motivated, our team is young. Unfortunately, few athletes are the long-term backbone of the team. Every year, a large number of children come to play this sport, but few stay for long.

— Is the frenzy surrounding the polluted Seine and the cancellation of training sessions an atypical story or a completely ordinary one?

— In my sports life I had to participate in similar conditions, but these were World Cup stages, where the water was, so to speak, of far from optimal quality. However, no one could withstand the training. And it makes no sense to compare the World Cup stages with the Olympic Games. Competitions of such a class must be organized at the appropriate level.

Initially considering the Seine as a venue for open water competitions, the organizers must have been intrigued by this issue. Everyone has read how many billions of euros were spent on cleaning the river, but in the end we saw disastrous consequences after the work was done – it is dirty, rusty bicycles, radiators and other waste are coming out of the water. All this creates a direct threat to the health of the athletes, and it should not be the case.

Cancellation of training the day before the start changes the psycho-emotional mood of swimmers before the race, this is not a plus; and it is a big disadvantage for the organizers.

— A bad grade and a retake?

– (Laughs). Yes. But retaking the exam is difficult. It was funny to see officials jumping into the Seine in wetsuits. Performing an artistic jump in a wetsuit without getting your head wet or touching the water with your face is one thing. It is another thing to endure two hours of time and contact struggle when water enters your mouth when you swallow it. We have seen how many triathletes felt bad after the competition. I am sure that consequences will arise after the open water. 10 km is 2 hours of hard work, and if the water is not of the best quality, then people with low immunity will feel the consequences of swimming.

— What can athletes do to protect their health?

— There were many funny ways. The same Sharon said that she would take antibiotics. Many people said that you just need to drink Coca-Cola, it disinfects everything, they even clean the toilets with it (laughs). I didn’t have such experience, I didn’t use anything except enterosorbents if the water quality was bad enough.

To be honest, anything can happen. Even our Russian championships on the Black Sea took place after the rains, when the mud comes off the mountains and you can’t swim for the next few days. But protecting yourself with antibiotics and getting antibiotic resistance from it, I think, is not the best choice.

— Could the swimmers express their discontent en masse and say that in such conditions they refuse to go to the start?

“I think everyone understood perfectly well that moving the venue was impossible. The Olympic Games are worth billions and billions of dollars. Where in France can we move the mobile competitions in order to organize them properly from a safety point of view? It’s not just about putting people back in the water. It’s also judges, boats and timing systems. It’s also certain financial expenses that I think Paris was not ready for.

So all the strikes are useless, given the small number of open water athletes at the Olympic Games. No one expressed their protest en masse, and that’s what happened. And we saw that, unfortunately, even in the most negative conditions, athletes are ready to sacrifice themselves to achieve their goals.

— Is it unrealistic to move it a few hundred kilometres to the English Channel?

— Another question for the organizers, they put the health of the athletes on the scale.

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