People, I need help here: the meaning of ‘Olympic-sized Swimming Pool’ could have such drastic meaning in different countries: 25m in US and 50m in the rest of the world (almost, I reckon? Full disclosure, I haven’t traveled the world … yet).<\/p>\n
I grew up in Beijing and taken to swim in the then-not-so-muddy Kunming Lake in the Summer Palace when I was only 6 moths old<\/a>. Since then I perfected my breaststroke in the public pools that measured 50 metres, my high school’s included. I also swam at Morrison Hill<\/a> in Hong Kong, London, Frankfurt, Paris, etc., even in Cairo, which were all 50m!<\/p>\n Then on my fray to the USA, first stop was Honolulu. When I made the reservation I chose a hotel boasting an Olympic-sized pool<\/em> on its brochure. Little did I know. So when I strided over to do my laps, did I realized it’s so small. Did I go to the wrong pool? No. “This IS the Olympic-sized pool”. The hotel employee who’s passing by told me. Excuse me??? Ok, I shouldn’t argue, after all, it’s a hotel.<\/p>\n Then I wandered into New York and eventually settled down. Now I really needed a pool to quench my thirst. Hmmmmm … few Olympic-sized pools I went to, were all half the size, well 25-yard. I was really dumb founded: why can’t US have the regular pools as the rest of the world do, as poor as China and puny \u5bf8\u91d1\u53ea\u571f as Hong Kong??? I am bewildered at the fact that American swimmers are grabbing record amount of medals at each summer Olympics with little (almost none?) imported help (i.e. like in badminton, so to speak).<\/p>\n Granted, there are few pools in NYC that are 50m, but given the size of this country and plentiful of the capital … this is my point and perplexity. Don’t you think that I hadn’t ask. The replies from various coaches were<\/p>\n “I have no idea …” to “Oh, this [short course pool] is cheap to maintain.”<\/p>\n HHhuh? Pardon me! Thinking that in 2003 when I went to Beijing and visited my high school. Guess what? The out door 50m pool was long gone, instead a sparking indoor Olympic-sized pool was built. (Ok, disclosure: my high school ranked 3rd in the country.) What’s more ironic is the adjacent Renmin University (my high school is on the campus of the Uni), only few yards away – has just built its own luxury indoor pool, 50m. Oh well, short course has it advantage: great for practicing flip turns, \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n Out of north shore on LI, there are two I used to go. One is built in 1998 for the Goodwill Games, Aquatic Center at Eisenhower Park, and the other is at Hofstra Uni where my kids learned to swim: King didn’t … Pumpkin improved. Most time, both pools are being cascaded into short courses to accommodate more teams and swimmers. Ok, getting bit anal: The dimensions of an Olympic pool are required to be 25 metres by 50 metres, stated by FINA.org, (FR 2.1.1). Truthfully, 25m = 82.02 ft, so the American’s short course is less than 25m. No wonder I have such good timing in 500m and 1000m (ok that’s a self-deprecating joke), and it’s legal! Americans are litigious, and yet there is a lawsuit over the pool size. Hmmm..<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" People, I need help here: the meaning of ‘Olympic-sized Swimming Pool’ could have such drastic meaning in different countries: 25m in US and 50m in the rest of the world (almost, I reckon? Full disclosure, I haven’t traveled the world … yet). I grew up in Beijing and taken to swim in the then-not-so-muddy Kunming […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44],"tags":[28,15],"class_list":["post-10734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-swimming","tag-beijing","tag-new-york"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.ireneeng.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10734","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.ireneeng.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.ireneeng.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.ireneeng.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.ireneeng.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10734"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.ireneeng.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10734\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.ireneeng.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.ireneeng.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.ireneeng.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}