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Hello and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Sunday, March 10, 2024. Paris plans to make history when it hosts the Summer Olympics this July, becoming the first ever

city to take the opening ceremonies out of a stadium.

Instead, a boat parade on the sun will carry more than 10,000 athletes,

but the sun has been plagued with sewage and pollution for decades and swimming has been banned there for more

than 100 years.

Plus, how will they manage the security risks and what's going on with the menu?

The stakes are high for the city of light. Will they be able to pull it off?

Our guest today is USA Today's sports reporter, Tom Shad. Thanks for being on the excerpt,

Tom. Thanks for having me.

It's an enormous undertaking to get the send clean enough for not only the opening ceremonies,

but also for swimming events.

Is it possible and how is the cleanup effort going so far?

Yeah, this is really kind of a focal point of the Paris Olympics.

This is something that even when they were first proposing holding the Olympics here and bidding for the games.

They wanted the send to be the centerpiece.

It's the centerpiece of the city.

They wanted to be the centerpiece of the games.

It's a very audacious effort, I think is the best word for it, to clean up this river that, as you noted, has been filthy and has had sewage runoff kind of dumped into it for more than 100 years.

Their plan is essentially to build, among other things, a giant kind of tank, a rainwater storage tank, because what happens in Paris is the sewage system is so dated that sometimes when they have a really heavy rainstorm the water kind of over floods the system and then some of the runoff ends up in the set.

And so their plan is to build this gigantic tank

...