Plus, they are the worldwide foremost experts on competitive swimming. Definitely I would be more interested in their evaluation of a swimming pool rather than trust "research results" from the company that built the pool in question.
On swimming, sure. But not fluid dynamics. It's a bit like music listeners shouldn't be treated as experts on music quality, or you'll get the audiophile nuts who need gold connectors. Some combination of personal experience for comfort and objective measurements for performance would be much better.
Silver corrodes relatively quickly and is expensive; that's a bad tradeoff against copper, which is much cheaper and nearly as conductive. So: gold-plated connectors on copper wires are extremely common.
None of that makes an audible difference, as it turns out: humans can't tell the difference between silver, copper, gold, aluminum, or even iron wires at audio frequencies and realistic (sub-kilometer) lengths with comparable resistance. All the advantages are material costs vs longevity without maintenance.
Also, most music listeners are not experts on music quality or sound reproduction quality (two very different things). Many music listeners are experts on their own preferences. Everyone is entitled to their own preferences.
Actually, gold is a worse conductor than both copper and silver, and only a little better than aluminum.
> and does not corrode in air
This is the real reason for plating contacts in gold. But gold wires would be a bad idea, since they would be worse than both copper and silver wires.
It’s not strange at all. Gold plating improving quality sounds truthy but is absolutely false. I have yet to read a serious study, at least single blind, showing any meaningful difference. And I have yet to read a serious engineering study showing any meaningful difference in characteristics. Steel plated jacks are just fine, and optical connectors make the whole thing irrelevant. As you write yourself:
> None of that makes an audible difference, as it turns out
> Also, most music listeners are not experts on music quality or sound reproduction quality (two very different things). Many music listeners are experts on their own preferences. Everyone is entitled to their own preferences.
Indeed. But their preference have no effect on Physics. If they are happy to get gold-plated ruthenium cables with diamond coatings, more power to them. It does not make these cables any better.
Theo are entitled to their own preferences, not their own reality.
But they are very prone to psychological effects.
Some kind of placebo effect or fear of coming to close to the ground.
Many athletes are superstitious.
People are going absolutely as hard as they can.
There's no way an Olympic pool for the actual Olympics should be that shallow. If athletes prefer a deep pool, the pool should be deep.
Swimming is one of the premier sports at Olympics. It's also a facility that has one of the most reuse if built properly.
You don't think a Paris aquatic center wouldn't get tons of reuse in world championships and other types of top end level events if they'd built a fast pool
It's a mystifying decision. Especially since one of the standout athletes on the French Olympic team is a swimmer, and it appears that their decision now cheap out on the pool cost him a world record on the Olympic stage on his home soil
Not necessarily. If they think the pool is slower, they’ll think they will have to swim for a bit longer, and may (possibly subconsciously) adjust their power output to allow for having something left when they have swum for as long as they think it would take them in a fast pool.
The Athens 2004 and Rio 2016 venues in particular are not doing very well post-Games.
Firstly, if a swimmer were to wrongly worry about hitting the floor even if there is 0% that any of their races ever saw them go as low as this floor, it could be in the back of their mind that going as low as they usually do might cause them problems and therefore seem logical to avoid.
Secondly, humans are not perfectly rational machines. Many a football (soccer for any Americans) player has come back from a nasty injury and found themselves unable to play as boldly as they used to, even though the odds of getting injured haven't changed just their perception of it.
I do agree that if the athletes feel it's needed then they should be listened to, just explaining that it's possible for both things to be true, that the depth doesn't create any physical problems yet still lead to changed behaviour from the swimmers.
But it seems unlikely all swimmers would be impacted equally by psychological effects. Some thrive some wither, lots of variation.
They didn't build a dedicated aquatic center. "The pool here in suburban Paris — a temporary vessel plopped into a rugby stadium"
Paris allegedly spend 1.5 billion to clean up the Seine presumably for fringe events like open water swimming and triathlon.
Again: premier top-of-program sport in Olympics primetime. All they had to do was dig a hole in a rugby field.
Perhaps this is why its shallower than normal.
The building was going to need structural modifications to make the pool standard depth.
Paris is swimming in a rugby stadium. It is loud and exciting. The US trials this year were in a temporary pool at the NFL stadium in Indianapolis with 60,000 seats filled! LA 2028 has already announced that they will be using a temporary pool in an NFL stadium and will have 38,000 seats. Brisbane 2032 hasn’t said anything as far as I’ve heard, but you can bet that’s also what they will do.
Edit - I was wrong about LA swimming capacity. It is going to be at the NFL stadium in Inglewood, but as of now they are only aiming for 38,000 seats
The current plan is a temporary pool in a new inner-city arena (15k seats) for the major swimming events, with diving, artistic swim and water polo prelims at an existing (to be refurbished) sports centre.
They don't have to outswim the bear. They just have to outswim the silver medalist.
BTW, it's not clear the decision was purely monetary. Raising the water level means ruining the view of the closest seats. The spectators would be that much further away.
Edit: maybe I’m not making myself clear:
I don’t doubt they are slower in the current pool than they were before. But I doubt they can accurately tell you that it’s because of the pool depth. There are other factors that could also influence the performance, and I’m not sure the swimmers can accurately determine which factor is the primary difference.
Would a large, blind empirical study be more trustworthy?
Your English is actually very, very good! I wouldn't have guessed that it is a second language for you.
Edit: for example, compare salt and fresh water properties here: https://ittc.info/media/4048/75-02-01-03.pdf#page2
At 25 degrees, fresh water has a Viscosity of 0.000890 Pa⋅s and sea water has 0.000959 Pa⋅s. That’s an 8% difference in viscosity by adding NaCl to water. Is it that strange that there could be a 1% difference in viscosity for example by having different additives in the pool water?
This is a weird standard. Out of 200 people doing anything, how many do you expect to set a personal record? Say you drive to the grocery store. Are you setting a time record for the trip more than 0.5% of the time?
Tbh I don't do much of that sort of thing for my grocery store trips at all.
The only way this could actually happen is if they intentionally sandbag their performance starting several years in advance -- and continuing indefinitely -- which would prevent them from qualifying for the Olympics in the first place. It's not a possibility.
Allow me to be equally facetious: according to your theory, Lamine Yamal is currently doing the same training he'd be doing deep into a season. Which is impressive, because his Instagram page currently suggests he's on holiday in another country.
I'm not the one who specified multiple years.
You're making my point. Scarblac claimed people set personal records at the Olympics because they plan to set that record years in advance, adopting a personal regimen with the goal that their performance before the Olympics won't be as good as their performance during the Olympics, because that would mean an embarrassing failure to set a personal record.
You're saying that (1) that can't happen, because people don't know they're going to be at the Olympics years in advance; and (2) the personal records result from short-term efforts, not long-term efforts.
And you're saying that, in particular, people don't know they'll be going to the Olympics at all until they see their own results from a recent high-stakes competition in the same event.
So... why aren't they devoting the same short-term efforts towards their performance in the Olympic qualifiers, or towards other annual competitions for their sport?
Every Olympic athlete, with the possible exception of the Jamaican bobsled team, has been equally motivated at dozens or hundreds of officially-measured points in the recent past. Why do we expect personal records at the Olympics?
And athletes are competent enough to achieve the time needed for qualification without going all-out. Look at the finish times of the heats. Pan Zhanle was over a second slower.
I have these data points:
1) The pool is shallower than normal in this Olympic
2) The pool seems to be slower this Olympic
3) swimmers seem to think it’s because the shallower depth
4) people responsible for building the pool say the effect of depth is negligible
5) there are other things that can be different about the pool except depth because the pools aren’t strictly standardized in their properties
My only claim was that point 3 doesn’t tell me a lot because I find it very plausible that you can’t really detect the reason for the slowness just from swimming. I don’t have positive proof of that though.
The gold standard would be an empirical randomized controlled trial to compare two pools, assuming you could hide “which pool” from the participants.
As a swimmer, I remember everyone lauding over how cool the Beijing Water Cube was because it was a uniform 3m deep which made it excellent for racing in - this was 16 years ago in 2008.
Since the Paris Olympics were accepted the regulation recommendation for pool depth has been revised from 2m to 2.5m
So clearly people vested in the sport and live and breathe it have seen enough evidence (including the sleepy regulatory board) to advise deeper pools.
If you wanted another possible explanation for how depth may affect the swim - a crucial part of the swim is the dive and also the underwater kicking. Both of those may have separate dynamics to swimming on the surface.
It will get you a fair amount of the way there, but at some point you have to go and actually do the thing to validate your model.
Australia, as one example, took swimming (and a few other sports) next level with a plethora of studies on all things performance related.
Any theorectical results from, say, CFD, would be parallel tested in real conditions and|or modelled in a scale pool (like a wind tunnel for water).
Those who competed at that level in sport in the larger countries almost certainly heard first hand bleeding edge results from cutting edge sport science.
My niece was not fast enough to be invited to the trials this year (missed by .03 seconds in her favorite event), but her time would have put her into the second heat in Paris. She's the ~150th fastest person in the USA, but would have come in ~25th place in the Olympics. It's the same situation in China, Australia, Canada, UK, etc.
Most countries only have a small handful of elite swimmers. The power nations can each provide 20-50 swimmers fast enough to get to the semi-finals in every single event. They're analyzing and optimizing for everything. This is why most of the elite swimmers not from these countries go and train in the powerhouse countries. And why the powerhouse countries don't care that they do. I'd bet that 90% of all the medal winners this year do their training in 5 countries.
Venue shopping might feel ick, but I don't think it's too bad if you're in the competitive envelope, as opposed to what's perhaps a tradition of less then competitive entrants in some events.
Like this reminds me of Beckham/Ronaldo doing free kicks. They had a deep understanding of controlling the ball well beyond what scientists knew how to measure and explain what they're doing.
I am aware the above may be proportionality bias, but at the same time there is some kind of "reverse proportionality bias" at play here: the assumption that since the effect of a shallow pool are too small, they can't significantly affect the athletes. Human behaviours are very nonlinear, and even very small sensory inputs may very well "throw off" an experienced swimmer.
The how can be argued