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The pool in Beijing was said to be fast (25 world records broken). But they were also using a now banned swimsuit. https://www.npr.org/2008/08/10/93478073/chinas-olympic-swimm...

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But you don't need to compare these results to 2008. It's not the suit. There wasn't a banned swimsuit used by everyone in Tokyo three years ago. (The 2020 Olympics were postponed a year.) As the first sentence of the article says, the eight men in the men’s 100-meter breaststroke final would have finished no better than eighth in Tokyo. Mactinenghi won in 59.03 seconds, more than two seconds slower than the current world record (and slower than the then-world record set at the 2008 Olympics).

The water cube was such an epic pool - extremely deep and the level perfectly flat rather than elliptical. I still have dreams of swimming in it

What do you mean the level was perfectly flat vs elliptical? The surface of the pool? I'm confused

I had the memory that race pools were deeper in the middle but I think that may have changed especially as I haven't competed since 2008

Here is a source from 2012 which shows pool depths weren't always uniform but it seems more modern pools are

https://www.swimmingworldmagazine.com/news/olympic-pools-whe...

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