Team GB star says ‘slow’ Paris Olympics pool is ‘like swimming in the SEA’ as athletes struggle to break records
BRITISH swimmer Jacob Whittle has likened racing in the Olympic pool to swimming in the SEA due to the rough waves caused by the depth of the pool.
The custom built tank in the La Defense Arena is only 2.15m deep – much more shallow than the 3m depth of the previous six Olympic Games.
And plenty of times have been slower than anticipated, with no records set during the first four days of action.
Whittle, 19, has slammed the “tough” conditions in the Paris pool and said the shallow dimensions are making it too choppy to swim in.
He told The Sun, after he just missed out on a semi-final spot in the 100m freestyle: “It’s a tough pool to swim in, tough when you’re on an outside lane.
“It’s just one of them pools, some pools feel great, some pools don’t, a few waves, feels a bit strange being a bit shallower, nothing that we can’t deal with.
“It’s just hard racing but that’s what we enjoy, that’s what we came here to do.
“It’s a bit like swimming in the sea but not to that extent. There’s a lot of waves when coming out of the turn.
“But it’s nothing to a high extreme, it’s like the 0.1 of a second, but it’s just something mentally that you have to deal with.”
In a sport often decided by milliseconds, the faster rebound of waves from the swimmer’s movements reverberating off the shallower bottom could be slowing this year’s athletes down.
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While the shallow pool could be the reason why NO world records have been set in Paris yet.
Organisers transformed a stadium usually used for hosting rugby or Taylor Swift concerts into a swimming arena.
The shallow pool also means that all the cameras and tech used to capture the races are a lot closer to the swimmers – potentially throwing them off.
Adam Peaty’s 100m breaststroke final on Sunday was the slowest in an Olympics since Athens 2004.
American coach Bob Bowman, who coached 23-times gold medallist Michael Phelps and now trains France hero Leon Marchand, admitted his swimmers had noticed the pool was on the shallow side.
He said: “They’ve noticed that it’s shallower, which it is, because particularly a lot of my swimmers are underwater. So it looks different because they’re closer to the bottom.
But the 59-year-old still expects world records to be broken during the meet.
He added: “It’ll have to be a significant swim, though.
“Because if you’re looking at the average times, a world record here would be very outstanding.”
But silver medallist Matt Richards, who missed out on gold by 0.02 seconds in the 200m freestyle, said: “I like shallower pools because my turns benefit from it: in a deep pool the drive off the wall always feels much ‘heavier’.”