Could the design of the pool in Rio be fueling Olympic swimming records?
Nine world or Olympic records have already fallen in Rio, but credit could belong to the architects’ design and technology of the pool and venue.
“A fast pool typically has at least three meters of depth to it,” says Teri McKeever, head coach of the University of California’s women’s swimming team, and who served as the U.S. head coach at London 2012. “The deeper the pool is the better, because the splash or the turbulence and everything takes longer to get down to the bottom and then it doesn’t ricochet back up into the swimmers.”
Dampening out the movement of the water in the pool prevents it from disrupting the swimmers, and allows them to swim as fast as they can. When a pool is empty, “you really want that pool to look like a lake in the Midwest in the summer at six o’clock in the morning,” says Scott Hester, president of Counsilman-Hunsaker, a company that designs and operates aquatic facilities and designed the pool for Atlanta 1996. “You see no waves, no ripples, it’s completely still, it’s completely quiet.” If a pool cannot effectively dampen out disturbances when it is empty, and when the greatest disruption may come from the circulation system that brings in clean water, its surface is likely to become very choppy during a race.
(SI.com)
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