By the end of an average week, Peaty would have swum around 40 miles — more than 2,500 lengths of a regular 25m swimming pool.
Which Olympian is going to be training in a half sized pool? And since when is that half size regarded as regular?
By the end of an average week, Peaty would have swum around 40 miles — more than 2,500 lengths of a regular 25m swimming pool.
Which Olympian is going to be training in a half sized pool? And since when is that half size regarded as regular?
When I used to build them a “regular” pool was around 12m, I think. Not saying we built many regular pools. They were all to-fit & all sorts of shapes. The one’s with the jaccuzzis were nice. Guy who owned Heron Garages had inside one with a water level bar. Style. Is this some other “regular”?
It sounds reasonable to me. The reference to a regular pool is so that readers will have something to relate to that makes sense to them. There’s no implication that Peaty trains in a regular pool.
There are probably 5-10,000 regular (25m) pools in Britain, and 5 or 6 Olympic sized (50m) ones.
I’ve got a 10m pool in my back garden…
Wiki says there are 50 50m pools in the UK…
Even Maplins Holiday Camp had an Olympic sized pool.
Yup – a 50m pool is a rarity compared to 25m ones.
Though I grant you that most of the now council owned pools up and down the country built in the Victorian era are actually more likely to be 50 cubits – a shade less than 25m 🙂
60-odd years ago there was a story doing the rounds about a midlands town-council who spent a fortune building a super new Olympic-size pool. It was opened with lots of razmataz and a National swimming competition.
After several World Records were broken by “national standard” swimmers, the pool was re-measured. It seemed that the builders had used Imperial measures (yards) instead of Metric (metres)… 🙂
And there was no room to extend the pool without demolishing half of the building,
Story may, of course be apochryphal, but I don’t think that there have ever been any National / International competitions held there since.
There was a story like that about the Bath Leisure Centre pool – a few feet too short to be a competition pool to “save money”.
After WWII the better councils built 33 yd pools. I should have expected them to be a sufficiently large minority by now for the description of 25yd pools as “regular” to have ceased.
>Story may, of course be apocryphal
It does appear in The Games: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5TewuwFkUo
One of the few 50 mtr pools in Austria is in the town of Schwechat, southeast of Vienna, where the airport is situated.
In the 90s it was refurbished and retiled. Only that the contractors didn’t remove the old tiles but tiled over the existing ones. The pool’s size was reduced ny 5cm and all records set in it had to be voided when someone measured the pool some years later.
I heard of a pool deliberately built a little short of 50m so that it wouldn’t be dominated by bloody competitions but would stay available for the kiddywinkies to lark about in.
“And since when is that half size regarded as regular?”
Since our general eur’pean climate, and most pools being indoors? A 25m pool requires a lot less space..
50m pools are large ( with the “new” olympic rules even more so ) , not standard.
And when you see a competitive swimmer do his/her turns in a 25 meter pool you can see why they’re large.. Actually very little swimming going on..
Come to think of it, maybe it was to be a smidgen shorter than 25m – same purpose, though.
Whether any council would have the balls to do it must be doubtful – the usual story of politics being dominated by small tribes who know exactly what they want, and who will agitate and vote against those who don’t give them their own way.
Time the Olympic farce was ended. Or rather all tax[payer involvement in the silly circus ended. If they are paying for themselves they can do as they like.
No nation should need this sort of facepainting shite to puff themselves up. That UK is now a second rate shithole cant be compensated for by cheap trinkets gained in sport poncing.
dearieme,
One of the reasons I joined Nuffield was just how much time wasn’t available at my local swimming pools for various reasons. I don’t mind the times blocked off for schools, but a lot of hours are given over to the clubs, so that a tiny number of people can compete in competitions that no-one gives a toss about.
I mean, the only time anyone cares about swimming is when a Briton wins an Olympic medal in it, the lowest level of jingoistic twattery.
Competitive mum and royal pain in the arse we used to know was sitting next to another mum, a friend of ours, watching their kids thrash up and down the pool at a school swimming gala.
Competitive mum turns to other mum and says, ‘I used to swim competitively, Rebecca.’
Rebecca: ‘Oh yes?’
Competitive mum: ‘Yes. I swam for the Brownies.’
Rebecca: ‘The Brownies? Brilliant.’
Competitive mum: ‘Did you ever swim Rebecca? Competitively, I mean?’
Rebecca (having had years of her shit): ‘Well, actually, yes, I did.’
Competitive mum: ‘Really? Who did you swim for?’
Rebecca: ‘Great Britain.’
I joined a private health club because the council run pools tended to be unavailable much of the time. Kids’ swimming lessons, aquarobics swimming club night etc. The club opened at six in the morning so I could swim before work. There was a seperate pool for the lessons and aquarobic classes so the main pool is always available to swim in.
If you’re talking about journalists and numbers, you’re doing it all wrong if you measure swimming pools in metres.
The journalistic unit for length is, as any fule kno, the London Bus.
Read once that 50m pools are so scarce in U.K. that some British competitions have been held in France as they couldn’t book anything for a long enough time to run the event