Open Water Swimmers Bettina Fabian, Leonie Beck Recovering after Olympic Marathon
Swimmers Bettina Fabian of Hungary and Leonie Beck of Germany posted to social media about ill effects from the Olympic marathon swim in Paris’ River Seine.
Beck posted to her Instagram stories that she had “vomited 9 times yesterday + diarrhea” after taking part in Thursday’s 10-kilometer swim at the Olympics. In an update Sunday morning, she thanked followers for their well wishes and said she was “feeling already way better.”
The German swimming federation reported that both Beck and Leonie Martens were suffering symptoms, as well as an unnamed male swimmer.
Fabian posted a photo of herself getting intravenous fluids, her bib number of “23” still visible on the back of her left hand. She posted the caption, “Show or athlete’s safety…?”
Fabian finished fifth in the race, 42.7 seconds behind winner Sharon van Rouwendaal and 34 seconds off the podium. Beck was ninth.
The marathon swims for men and women, as well as the swimming portion of the triathlon, went ahead in the Seine despite concerns leading into the Games over water quality. Despite canceled tests events and a postponement of the triathlon by a day, all four swims in the Seine went off more or less as planned, with levels of bacteria (especially E. coli) within allowable safety limits as determined by World Aquatics, the Paris 2024 Organizing Committees and health organizations that they consulted with.
Fabian’s and Beck’s experience is not uniform. A number of female swimmers have posted about post-Olympic celebrations in France and abroad, while Australian Chelsea Gubecka, who finished 14th in the race, posted a screenshot of E. coli test levels in the Senie with the message that they were, “within Australian standards! Very good.” as a way of assuaging the concerns she’d gotten.
At the other end of the spectrum, bronze medalist Ginerva Taddeucci of Italy posted a meme clip from the 2006 movie, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, in which the character of Davy Jones asks captured sailors if they fear death. She captioned it with, “the organizers of the 10-km in the Seine to the athletes.”
