Parisians are beginning to get excited about the idea of swimming in the Seine again. To say ‘again' is to really turn back the years, because for decades it's been unthinkable.

Once the dumping site of so many houseboats and other creators of sewage and pollution, the race to prepare the City of Light for the 2024 Summer Olympics has seen the city "overwhelmingly" improve the quality of the water, making it all set for the triathlon, and plenty of recreation in the decades to come besides.

Despite being called the most romantic river in the world, the Seine was well on its way to being ecologically dead in the mid-2010s. Despite being immortalized in song, poetry, and art, the river had an unappealing green-brown color—typical of the waste it was subjected to.

The $2.3 billion project was started shortly after Paris was awarded the games, and by 2018 they had already passed a law to mandate the Seine's many houseboats to moor by sewage access—they had been dumping right into the river before.

A graveyard of discarded bikes, shopping trolleys, tires, and god knows what else, a water quality survey in July and August of last year found it was "overwhelmingly good" and ready to host swimmers like French triathlete Thibaut Rigaudeau.

"We will be the ‘testers' I hope we don't get sick," Rigaudeau told ABC News Australia, adding people are already asking him questions like ‘are you scared of swimming in the Seine? It looks disgusting.'

The Seine will feature as the centerpiece of the Olympic Games' opening ceremony, which for the first time in history will take place along the banks of the river and upon it, rather than in the stadium.

More than half a billion euros will be going to huge storage basins and other public works that will reduce the need to let bacteria-laden water spill out into the Seine when it rains, while other government money is going to improve sewage treatment plants along the banks and at the tributary of the Marne.

One storage facility is located near Paris' Austerlitz train station, and may save as much as 20 Olympic swimming pools of dirty water from being spat raw into the river.

But the project is looking beyond the games for five ideal bathing spots, promising to reinvigorate the entire Parisian community with a place to go swimming in the summer heat.

Fish have also been seen in greater numbers, and if the Seine is anything like the Thames or the Mersey in England, there are indeed romantic days ahead for the city.

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