At 19, Arthur Germain launched a major challenge: swim down the 780 km of the Seine, without assistance, in total autonomy.
Son of the mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo, the young man had already distinguished himself in 2018 by becoming the youngest Frenchman to swim the English Channel, at only 16 years old.
Precocious swimmer - he started his first breaststrokes at the age of two and a half - Arthur tackles this time the second longest river in France (behind the Loire), starting next June 6 from Source-Seine (in Côte-d ' Or) to arrive 52 days later at its mouth, in Le Havre.
A hell of a challenge, unprecedented, that he has been preparing for months, between daily training sessions in the swimming pool, requests for authorizations to cross the 300 municipalities that mark his route, survival courses in nature ...
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The crazy challenge of Anne Hidalgo's son on the Seine
Because Arthur will be alone, from start to finish.
And above all, nothing should be neglected.
“I'll have everything I'm going to need with me.
Something to bivouac every evening, freeze-dried meals, a stove ... And everything will be transported on a kayak that I will have to tow behind me while swimming, ”explains Arthur.
Behind the sporting feat - he will swim an average of 15 km per day, in cold and often polluted water - Arthur Germain also wants to make people aware of nature and its preservation.
"By being in total symbiosis with the river, whether swimming or bivouacking on the shore, I want to show people the beauty of the species that inhabit it, its fauna, its flora, but also makes him, between the waste and the pollution which one finds everywhere, especially in the cities ”.
A convinced ecologist, especially after a trip to Africa where he found himself swimming in a sea of waste, Arthur will take a camera with him and will be followed from a distance by a film crew to immortalize his incredible journey.
“The idea is to tell in this documentary the sporting challenge, but also, and this is very important for me, the beauty of the landscapes that border the Seine.
The objective is to make people aware of ecology ”.