Originally appeared on E! Online
Tyler Mislawchuk knows that to be successful, one has to give it their all.
And sometimes, that comes with a whole lot of puke. After the athlete, who represented Canada in the 2024 Paris Olympics, went viral for throwing up 10 times after swimming in the Seine River during the men’s triathlon July 31, he gave insight into what really caused his upset stomach.
"I happened to swallow a lot of water during the race," Mislawchuk told CBC Thursday. "Nothing to do with the quality. My stomach was just extremely full, and so that ended up being a limiting factor for me in the race. You put that with one hour, 40 minutes of going as hard as you can, stuff’s going to happen."
The 29-year-old, who placed ninth in the competition, didn’t expect his post-race moment to make headlines. Laughing, he added, "It’s all over the internet and it's not why I want to go viral."
The weather was also a factor. Being from Canada, where he emphasized how cold it can get, he’s not quite acclimated to France’s summer weather, either. But that didn’t stop Mislawchuk — who had to withdraw from the 2020 Tokyo Games due to an Achilles injury — from giving it his all.
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"At my last Olympics, there was the injury and with all the stuff that happened there was a lot of 'what ifs,'" he said to Triathlon Magazine in an interview published July 31. "I have no 'what ifs' on the day, I went for it, it was absolutely everything. I vomited 10 times after the race … it got hot in the last laps."
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It’s not surprising that the Seine River’s water quality came into question when he started vomiting, as their race was postponed from its initial July 30 start date due to unsafe levels of fecal matter following heavy rain.
Mislawchuk wasn’t the only athlete to speak about the Seine’s water quality. Belgian triathlete Jolien Vermeylen, who competed in the women’s race after the men’s, shared her less than impressed decision to hold the competitions in the famed river.
"While swimming under the bridge, I felt and saw things that we shouldn’t think about too much," she told reporters. "The Seine has been dirty for a hundred years, so they can’t say that the safety of the athletes is a priority. That’s bulls--t!"
Ahead of the 2024 Olympics, the city of Paris spent $1.5 billion to clean up the Seine, where swimming had been banned since 1923. To soothe critics' concerns, the city’s mayor Anne Hidalgo, Paris 2024 Olympic President Tony Estanguet and other officials took a swim in the river to prove its safety.
"The water is wonderful," Hidalgo told NBC News after her swim July 17, noting that the water was "very cool and very nice."
