Léon Marchand will never be 24 again, the age of the heyday of middle-distance swimmers. Nor will he have his fans waiting for him in a hall full of 17,000 fans to pump him up like they are these days at La Défense. The zenith of the French hero is now. Now is when he intended to set his marks in stone and break the absolute record for the 400-metre medley. But there is a problem. It cannot be now because the pool that the Paris Games organisers ordered to be built is not deep enough: 2.20 metres compared to the 2.50 metres that the international federation has imposed as a minimum from 2023. Two spans that represent an immensity in a sport that discriminates between the good and the fabulous in hundredths of a second. The physics of fluids conspires against Marchand and against the fifteen or so swimmers who entered this championship with times bordering on world records.
“You have to find depth to reduce the resistance produced by the waves on the surface,” explains Raúl Arellano, a biomechanical specialist in charge of the laboratory at the University of Granada, one of the centres that has most studied the phenomenon that enables elite swimmers to propel themselves. “When they do the underwater swimming phase at the start and during the turns, swimmers generate vortices with the undulation of their body,” he says. “These vortices are rotational flows, similar to a wave, that push swimmers and produce their maximum energy when they are done in sufficiently wide areas. But if you get too close to the bottom or the surface, these vortices are less efficient. Swimmers go down more than a metre and a half. If the pool is 2.5 metres deep, you still have a metre below. In Paris, the distance from the bottom has been reduced.”
When a swimmer wants to go under 4 minutes in the 400-meter medley, which is an epic time, all these details have an impact. As it is a distance of 400 meters, this is amplified because the best swimmers can advance up to 100 meters underwater, 15 meters for every 50. Marchand was affected in a decisive way because he is a swimmer who uses the underwater phase in an extraordinary way.”
After four days of finals, the results point to a sudden drop in speeds. A phenomenon that, with a few exceptions, such as the Australian women’s relay, means that the morning and evening times in practically all the competitions are worse than at the Tokyo 2021 Games and the Fukuoka 2023 World Championships, or that swimmers such as David Popovici, the first man to swim the 200-metre freestyle in 1m 42 seconds in a textile swimsuit, won gold on Monday with a time of 1m 44.72s. A time that would not have been enough to win any Olympic championship since Sydney 2000. As poor as the time in the 100 breaststroke final, settled by the eight participants in the 59-second range, when in Tokyo they all went under 59s and Peaty took gold with 57s.
A parking lot
Sources close to the organisation say that the pool could not be made deeper because of the demands of the engineers who supervised the work. Beneath the ground of La Défense there is a car park whose roof, they explain, could not bear any weight. Each cubic metre of water is equivalent to one tonne. Increasing the depth of the basin to a minimum of 2.5 metres meant adding almost 500 tonnes of water.
Alarmed by the retrograde records, the organisers of Paris 2024 issued a statement yesterday: “We agreed on the characteristics of the pool with the international federation, when its criteria required a minimum depth of two metres and the La Défense pool was built with a depth of 2.20. The certification of the project took place before January 2023, when the federation changed its regulations and required pools of 2.50. These requirements are not retrospective. But so far five Olympic records have been broken and we hope that more will be broken.”
Paris hosts a lovely Games. But the level of speed in the water has plummeted. In Tokyo, 25 Olympic records and five world records were broken; in Rio, 15 Olympic records and eight world records; and in London, 16 Olympic records and eight world records. The manufacturer that made most of these pools is the Italian company Myrtha, the same one that built the pool in Paris with the same technology that produced removable stainless steel pools famous for their depth, for the overflows that absorb waves, and for the number of records they have registered in recent decades.
“I think the pool is slower than usual and there have been various controversies about this,” said Thomas Ceccon, after trying the pool last Saturday. This was confirmed by the Spaniard Hugo González: “We know that the pool today does not comply with the recommendations of World Aquatics. They recommend a minimum of 2.5 metres and this one measures between 2.10 and 2.20. It seems that it is noticeable. Although if it is slower, it is slower for everyone.”
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