Talk:Leeds International Pool

Not an Olympic pool
I've deleted from the article the unsourced claim from the article's introduction that the pool was inches too narrow to qualify as an Olympic pool. My understanding is that this statement is technically true but it is misleading without extensive context. When it's stated that the pool is too narrow to be an Olympic pool, the inference is that some idiot built the pool too small, making it useless. However, this is not the case. Olympic pools are a requirement only for the Olympics and the FINA World Championships; all other FINA events can be held in pools which are somewhat narrower. There was never any intent to hold the Olympics or World Championships in Leeds, so there was no need to build a pool wide enough for those events; the Leeds pool was wide enough for general FINA competition.

Specifically, according to the FINA regulations, an Olympic pool must be wide enough for ten 2.5-metre lanes (FR3.2); only the middle eight lanes are used for competition and the "spare" lanes protect the swimmers in lanes 1 and 8 from wash reflecting from the walls of the pool. However, for general FINA competition, the pool only needs eight 2.5-metre lanes, plus at least 0.2m outside the first and last lanes (FR2.5). That is, an Olympic pool must be at least 25m wide (10x2.5m) but, for general FINA competition, only 20.4m is required (8x2.5m + 2x0.2m). The Leeds pool comfortably exceeded the narrower standard; the fact that it did not quite meet the wider standard, with which it was never intended to comply, is immaterial. Dricherby (talk) 11:20, 20 January 2010 (UTC)


 * As someone who used the pool regularly in the late-1990s/early-2000s, the general "folklore" was that the issue was not the width, but that the pool was too short by a couple of centimetres/fractions of an inch, because no provision had been made for competition touchpads. This fact was certainly noted in the Leeds Civic Trust report on the future of the pool, but that appears to have disappeared from their website at some point. Nick Cooper (talk) 12:46, 20 January 2010 (UTC)

Assessment comment
Substituted at 21:48, 29 April 2016 (UTC)