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Comment by AtlasBarfed | Hacker News Reader

There's Olympic gold medals on the line.

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

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Placebo or fear can absolutely be a possibility regardless of how badly they want to do well because it's the Olympics.

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.

> Placebo or fear can absolutely be a possibility regardless of how badly they want to do well because it's the Olympics.

But it seems unlikely all swimmers would be impacted equally by psychological effects. Some thrive some wither, lots of variation.

> 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

They didn't build a dedicated aquatic center. "The pool here in suburban Paris — a temporary vessel plopped into a rugby stadium"

So you agree they cheaped out?

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.

> People are going absolutely as hard as they can.

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.

In fact a lot of the upcoming olympics specifically don’t have as much new construction because of the white elephant criticisms of the Olympics leading to most developed host candidates declining and/or having hosting referenda rejected.

The Athens 2004 and Rio 2016 venues in particular are not doing very well post-Games.

> There's Olympic gold medals on the line. People are going absolutely as hard as they can.

They don't have to outswim the bear. They just have to outswim the silver medalist.

As much as it's about winning the medals, this is about setting personal and world records, too.

Regardless, they have to make do with what they have. Nobody is moaning that the weather affects triathlon timings.

If the organizers controlled the weather and made it rain, people would absolutely be complaining.

People are complaining that the local g varies, though. https://www.xkcd.com/852/

Right, if you are swimming in multiple events then it doesn't necessarily make sense to swim as hard as you can in the early events if that is going to tire you out for the latter events.

The pool is a temporary structure, La Defence is a multi purpose venue. The pool is literally a tub on top of a rugby field.

Perhaps this is why its shallower than normal.

All major competitions will be in temporary pools from now on. It’s a major spectator sport with growing popularity, but as seen in 2008, 2012, 2016, etc purpose-built facilities for that crowd size are failures.

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

> Brisbane 2032

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.

Thanks - it makes perfect sense. There is nothing wrong with a temporary pool, and as we've seen in Paris there are records being set.

I had read in one of the other articles about this issue that you are correct, that is exactly why the pool is shallower than usual.

The building was going to need structural modifications to make the pool standard depth.

Experience shows that the pools don't get much reuse. Look at the abandoned venues in Beijing. After all, there's only one world championship each year and dozens of very nice pools already on the planet.

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.

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