This is part of Slate’s 2024 Olympics coverage. Read more here.
The return of the Olympic Games means the return of “everyone’s” “favorite” biennial sports-adjacent column: Olympics Jerk Watch, in which I apply rigorous scientific analysis to conclusively determine whether various Olympic athletes, coaches, executives, broadcasters, and hangers-on are jerks. I write this column not for my own pleasure—indeed, being scientifically rigorous gives me no pleasure at all—but for the benefit of Slate’s loyal readers, who both demand and deserve to know the jerk status of the Olympians for whom they are rooting. Let’s begin the Paris edition of Jerk Watch by assessing a species of potential jerk that has become sadly prominent over the past five years: the Public Health Jerk.
Nominee: Seth Rider
Home country: USA
Known for: Competing in the triathlon, not washing his hands, citing “science” as a reason for not washing his hands
Why he might be a jerk: The Seine is a beautiful river that runs through the heart of Paris. Like many rivers, however, it can also be pretty disgusting. For more than a century, the Seine was so dirty and gross that people weren’t allowed to swim in it. Then, Paris won its bid for the 2024 Summer Olympics and embarked on a $1.5 billion river-degrossification project in advance of the Games. In mid-July, days before the opening ceremony, the mayor of Paris took a ceremonial dip in the Seine and emerged from its waters clean as a whistle, without having been transformed into a hideous sewage monster. Très bien, non?
Well, uh, non. One major goal of the Seine cleanup project was to make its waters safe enough that Olympic athletes could swim in its waters. (Marathon swimming and the aquatic part of triathlon are scheduled to happen in the Seine.) Last weekend, though, heavy rains sent a bunch of waste shooting into the river, thus raising its E. coli levels to the point that organizers decided to briefly postpone the men’s triathlon swim. (As my colleague Henry Grabar points out, officials say that this wastewater influx came not from Paris itself but from communities upstream of Paris.) Bad luck for the triathlon!
But luck is the residue of preparation, and no triathlete in Paris is more prepared to face the scourge of E. coli than Seth Rider, a 27-year-old American who claimed to have been following an, uh, interesting training regimen. Rider recently announced that he has been trying “to increase my E. coli threshold by exposing myself to a bit of E. coli in your day-to-day life. … Just little things throughout the day, like not washing your hands after you go to the bathroom and stuff like this.”
There’s a term for people who don’t wash their hands after going to the bathroom: We call them jerks! And it’s especially jerky to cultivate dirty hands as part of some crackpot home-brew “inoculation” scheme designed to master E. coli by ingesting E. coli. This sort of plan doesn’t just sound ineffective and unscientific; it’s reminiscent of the sorts of “microdosing” routines touted by inexplicably popular men’s rights podcasters and other unserious individuals. In my experience, this sort of “biohacking” is also generally synonymous with jerkiness.
Is a disgusting training routine inherently a jerky training routine? Maybe not under normal circ*mstances, but I would submit that in the context of the Olympic Village, disgusting behavior is jerky behavior. In Paris right now, there are thousands of athletes from across the world cohabiting with one another in a small, enclosed community. If one of those athletes has been walking around with intentionally dirty hands—touching doorknobs, handling silverware, and otherwise spreading his stupid germs around—then that person runs the risk of thus potentially making other Olympians sick. Deliberately courting E. coli wouldn’t just unnecessarily expose Rider to germs. It would unnecessarily expose lots of people to germs. Sounds pretty jerky to me!
Where did Rider get the idea to prepare for the dirty Seine by microdosing E. coli? Well, uh, according to him, “It’s actually backed by science. Proven methods.” Oh, well, in that case, if the methods are proven ones, then carry on, sir! I’ve reached out to a couple of microbiologists to get their read on this and will update this post if and when I hear back from them. In the meantime, I will just note that these “proven methods” seem suspiciously similar to the methods touted by Westley in The Princess Bride when he reveals that he has built up a tolerance to poison by ingesting trace amounts of it over time. The Princess Bride is a good movie, but it’s not a science documentary, you jerk!
Why he might not be a jerk: After finishing in 29th place in the triathlon Wednesday, Rider claimed that he had been joking all along, and that he hadn’t really been microdosing E. coli to prepare for his triathlon swim. So maybe, instead of an Olympics Jerk Watch column, this should be an Olympics Joke Watch column. (“Olympics Joke Watch” is a much, much less popular feature than “Olympics Jerk Watch,” but it’s one I’m committed to continuing all the same.) On the other hand, people who catch flak for saying gross and transgressive things often try to patch up the damage by claiming that their statement was actually a joke, so I don’t know if this admission truly clears things up!
Regardless, there’s a case to be made that this Jerk Watch should instead go to the Parisian officials who spent $1.5 billion to “clean” the Seine only to have their plans literally go to sh*t because it rained? Any river-degrossification effort that can be defeated by a rainstorm isn’t much of an effort at all, in my book. If the Seine-cleaner-uppers of Paris had spent that money effectively and had in fact succeeded in their goal—or, conversely, if they’d realized at the outset that cleaning the Seine was a lost cause and hadn’t even bothered to start—then Rider wouldn’t have had to contemplate licking doorknobs or whatnot in preparation for swimming in a dirty river.
World-class athletes are weird. They live in little training bubbles and spend all day training, and recovering, and focusing single-mindedly on their sport. Rider comes from a family of triathletes and has been training for triathlons since he was a child. This is a man who has spent literally his entire life focusing on one thing, and—joke or no joke—we cannot always expect elite athletic monomaniacs to also know a lot about science. What I’m trying to say is that someone who would choose to not wash their hands for bacterial acclimation purposes might just be sort of sheltered and naïve and not actually a jerk.
Anyway, Rider would hardly be the first athlete to indulge in a weird, dubiously effective, sort of gross training program in pursuit of some incremental edge over the competition. Baseball outfielder Moisés Alou used to urinate on his hands in order to toughen them up. Compared to that, Seth Rider is basically Dr. Fauci.
If Rider were indeed a belligerent anti-vaxxing jerk, the odds are good that his social media accounts would be filled with triggering posts along those lines, and/or declarations of fandom for people like Aaron Rodgers and Jordan Peterson. But Rider’s Instagram account has none of that sort of business; instead, it’s just a lot of photos and videos of him riding his bike, and running, and swimming, and occasionally enjoying a coffee. Rider doesn’t seem like a culture warrior—he just seems like a guy who is very, very focused on one specific goal.
Finally, I think if we were all being honest with ourselves, we’d be forced to admit that sometimes we don’t wash our hands after going to the bathroom either. Let those of us who have never had dirty bathroom hands cast the first jerk stone.
Jerk score: As a reminder, we score our Olympics Jerk Watch candidates on style, technical merit, execution, and a floating “bonus” category. I’ll give Seth Rider 1 out of 3 for style, because there’s nothing very stylish about contaminated hands. Then, 1 out of 3 for technical merit, because my strong sense is that there is very little technical merit to the “defeat E. coli by preemptively ingesting E. coli” thesis. I’ll rate him 2.5 out of 3 for execution, because if this was all just a joke, it was a pretty convincing one.And 1 out of 1 in the category of “Is his ‘one weird health trick’ ripped off from the script of The Princess Bride?” So, 5.5 out of 10 for Seth Rider. Next!
