Short Wave - Was The Paris Olympic Pool Slow?

Episode Date: August 7, 2024

In the last week, we've seen swimmers diving headfirst into the 2024 Paris Olympics pool, limbs gracefully slicing through the water. And yet, world and Olympic records weren't broken at quite the rate some expected, leading many on social media to speculate: Was the pool the culprit? With the help of NPR correspondents Bill Chappell and Brian Mann, we investigate.Read Bill Chappell's full story about this here. Want us to cover the science behind more Olympic sports? Email us at [e-mail]. We'd love to hear from you!Listen to Short Wave on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, shortwavers, Emily Kwong here. We are just over halfway through the 2024 Olympics. And I have personally loved watching the swimmers. I mean, Katie Ludecky, Tori Husk. Women out there are kicking butt. And today I have two gentlemen on joining me to talk about the sport. One of them is Bill Chappell, a correspondent and editor at NPR.

Hey, Bill. Hey, Emily, glad to be here. We are so happy to have you. And we also have Brian Mann, a correspondent. for NPR's National Desk. Hi, Brian. Hey, there, Emily. You are calling us from Paris itself, because that is where you're covering the Olympics. Yeah, I've spent the last week at the swimming pool here, kind of living and breathing this.

And the pool itself has been kind of the talk of Paris. Right. This pool has been the site of triumphs, but also some disappointment for the U.S. team. They're taking home a lot of medals, but not as many gold as they were hoping for. Yeah, a lot more silver and bronze for the U.S. team this year than gold. Some athletes, Emily, who seemed like they were set up for gold, they're missing out on medals altogether. The U.S. did bounce back the two final days of competition. There's been a little shift here. They won four gold medals. And also, this is big two world records broken in the last couple days by the U.S. Yeah, a total of four world records dropped during

these Olympic swimming competitions. Nice. I mean, but, you know, some people are wondering if it's the pool itself that was slowing people down, because those records didn't fall as early and as often as people thought they might. Okay, I've seen some of this kicking around the internet. What is up with this pool? I mean, you would think it's the Olympics. These are Olympic swimmers. They're the best in the world.

The pool has to be the best in the world also, right? Yeah. Right. I mean, this has really been sort of like a big Olympic science experiment. People thought at first this pool might be slow. Some people still think that. But there are a ton of variables. And what's cool here is that these athletes are all talking about things like

turbulence and wave action and how that all affects their performances. So today on the show, why some are calling this year's Olympic pool slow, how it might be keeping some world records at bay, and whether any of that even matters. I'm Emily Kwong and you're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. Okay, Bill and Brian, we're kicking it in our little kiddie pool, watching these real athletes swim, and we're just going to talk about some of the conditions of what we're seeing. You've both reported on this year's Olympic swimming events and this idea that we saw spreading around social media early on

that there were fewer records being broken this Olympics. Some people think it's because of a slow pool. What does that mean? What's a slow pool? Well, I talked to some of the aquatic designers for USA swimming, and they said when they're designing a pool, they look at things like the pool depth, the lane lines, and gutters. And on a really basic level, slow pools are shallow.

And that means there's more turbulence. more waves, which makes it harder for swimmers to stay streamlined in the water. And this year's pool is a little bit different. It's about seven feet deep that did meet world aquatic standards when it was designed. But last year, the governing body changed the rules to say pools have to be at least 8.2 feet deep, and that's really the new standard. Okay. So you're saying the Paris pool, it is a little more shallow than the governing body would like. What kind of pool does make for ideal swimming conditions? Well, I'll, I'll let Kevin Post explain part of it just kind of set the scene. He's the CEO at Councilman Hunsaker. That's the

official aquatic designers for USA swimming. If you walk in in the morning and you see that it just looks like glass and there looks like the water's not moving at all, that would be considered a fast pool because the water has no impact on the athlete's outcome, right? It's just there for them to swim it. And the quicker you can get back to that moment of quiescence, or it's all nice and calm and quiet, the faster the pool. Quiet essence. That sounds quite nice, actually. I want to swim in a pool of quiescence. So if a swimmer gets in a pool and competes in their event, they generate these waves. The measure of how fast the pool is is kind of how quickly all those waves calm down.

Is that right? Yeah, that's right. And remember, we're talking here about tiny variations. It's not like, you know, the waves in a jacuzzi. These are swimming competitions where winning and losing, setting a new world record, that all comes down to hundreds of a second. So just these really small fluctuations in how a pool performs can matter. I spoke about this with one of America's star swimmers, a guy named Caleb Dressel, after he'd spent a bunch of time in this Paris pool. Now that you've had a full week here, what's your take on that? Is it different?

Could you feel anything? Yeah, I mean, there's evidence for and evidence against it. I don't know. Obviously, it's not the depth that we've been used to for every swim meet ever. I don't even know if you can pick one stroke that was slower than the others. And what's interesting there in what Caleb says, Emily, is that these variations can be so specific that some swimmers think different pools can impact different swimming strokes. You know, one pool might be faster for the backstroke, one faster for the breast stroke. That's how clinical a different pool can be. Wow.

Yeah. And I mean, when I was talking to Kevin from Councilman Hunsegger, he said, you know, the founders of that company who were both pretty legendary pool analysts and coaches, they studied the ideal pool depth before the 1996 Atlanta games. And they found that swimmers basically impact the water around them by about five feet. Five feet in like any direction. It's like an orb of impact. Yeah. Interesting. So I suppose the deeper the pool is the more space the swimmers have to impact the water around.

them without it being reflected off the bottom and come up to the top and, like, slow down the swimmers. Yeah. And I mean, you've seen this year especially, some athletes just seem to be swimming deeper now than they used to. I mean, you know, we've seen people like the French athlete, Leon Marchand, even Michael Phelps has commented about his swims and his style. He goes so deep after his initial dive. And then after his turn, it's just like a submarine coming off the wall. So, you know, Kevin told me, you know, future pools might just have to account for turbulence deeper in the water. I know from the U.S., we've been watching these events, and you've seen cameras zooming along the bottom of the water, too. So that's another thing people have talked about as a possible source of turbulence.

This was so cool about the Olympics is the sport changes, right? And how we talk about the sport changes. I mean, I remember during the Beijing Olympics, people talked about that as being, by contrast, a fast pool. It was like 10 feet deep compared to the 7-ish feet we're seeing in Paris right now. Yeah, and London in 2012 and Rio in 2016, they had deep pools as well. But again, there are lots of variables. The Beijing Olympics had high-tech full-body swimsuits that helped athletes cut through the water. Those are now banned.

But that may be why a lot of those 2008 records still stand. And there are other things at play, too. Kevin says even the gutters on the sides of the pool, they can impact all of this. The way to make a fast pool was to make sure that none of that water that was being pushed off by the swimmer in hitting a wall was coming back. I had never thought about a gutter system affecting swimming before. What are some other things? What are some other variables in the pool design that could affect the swimmers? So you've probably seen the touch pads the athletes are hitting when they come back to the wall and this big splash come.

Yeah, they smack them. Yeah. So the in walls have touch pads. And under USA swimming rules, they actually sit at water level. Uh-huh. So, you know, they're coming in. The water goes over in the gutter. It's no problem.

But for international standards, the touchpads have to be around 12 inches of touchpad above the water. wall as well. So they do what they can to mitigate it, but, you know, it's going to block part of that gutter and it prevents some of the gutter from absorbing the waves. One of the downsides of international events is they are absolutely slower pools because of that touchback. Because the wave splashes back on the athlete a little bit, a little bit. A little bit. For you and me, it'd be like no big thing. It would not affect my time. I would not get a medal. Either way. And I mean, the U.S. rules are very specific at the NCAA championships. They have double lane lines just to kind of reduce the chop and waves as much as they possibly can.

You know, one thing, Emily, that I would say is that it's important that the evolution of these pools, they've gotten so much better over the years. People used to say, like, which lane you were in could make all the difference between winning and losing. So the slight variability in Paris, you know, compared to how things used to be, it's really a lot less. And another thing that's been interesting here in Paris is that people talk about things like the, food being offered to athletes during the games, the weather. A lot of swimmers said they were thrown off more by the bus rides and the tough schedules and the beds in the Olympic Village, that that was a bigger factor for them than speed in the pool. So, you know, it's just hard to know how each one of

these pieces of the puzzle affects what we've seen through these Olympics. It's just goes to show you that sports is not a controlled experiment. Yeah, also remember that once athletes get here to Paris or the Olympics, they're not out to set world records or Olympic records. All they're trying to do is win medals, especially a gold medal. And that affects how they plan their races. The goal is to touch that wall. Really, it's not to beat the clock. And is any of this psychological? Like, once word gets out, true or not that this pool is slow, do athletes feel slower? I mean, it could be fast racing definitely inspired. other fast racing. But there's also a tradeoff when you're in a pool and it's like in terms of

just the depth, you look down at the bottom of the pool and you're swimming. Think about like being an airline or going 500 miles an hour. If you're going 500 miles an hour at the ground level, it would feel amazingly fast. But from your airliner, you're like, okay, we're cruising along. And people say, you know, it's hard for swimmers to know exactly how fast they're going if the pool is a different depth than they're used to. And the psychological aspect is this is huge. I talked to a former world record holder named Jimma Fleming, who's from the UK. She told me the two times that she spoke to psychologists were once when her mother died and another when she won a world record.

So like the pressure these athletes face and the psychological part of this is huge. I think all that's right. And I think one of the things I heard from the athletes themselves this week, Emily, is they just really wanted to put this whole question of the speed or slowness of this pool out of their head. You know, they focus on what they can control. That's what athletes do to win. And they didn't want to be thinking about the depth or speed of a pool. And there's nothing at all they can do about it.

So a lot of times when we ask this question, they really tried to try to move on to the next thing. That's what makes them the best of the best. That's what makes them Olympians. Well, thank you both so much for coming on this program. It was so great to talk to you, Brian. Enjoy Paris. Thanks. It's fun.

And Bill? I'll see you around the building. Yeah, see, Emily. Nice to talk to you, too, Brian. This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson and edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. Brian, Bill, Rachel, and Rebecca, check the facts. Beth Donovan is our senior director

and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Emily Kwong. Thank you for listening to Shortwave from NPR.