The bizarre reason why we might not see any swimming records broken at Paris 2024

The Olympics is all about showcasing the strongest, fittest and fastest athletes on the planet, but there is one event at the Paris edition where the athletes look slower than ever – swimming.

Just a few days into the 14-day global competition, and many fans are perturbed by the lack of record breaking – or threatening – action in the pool events.

The first notable case in point came on Saturday night in the women’s 400m freestyle. Australia’s Ariarne Titmus came into the competition looking primed to set records a blaze, but even her Gold medal swim of 3:57.49 was well below the record of 3:55.38 that she set at the World Championships last year.

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So what is going on, are all the swimmers in the world just off their game at the Olympics? Well, there’s a rather strange reason behind the lack of explosive times, and it all has to do with depth.

Pool depth to be precise. The Paris Olympic pools are 2.2 meters deep, or roughly 7-feet-2. Typically an Olympic pool has a depth of 3m, so it’s a difference of 80cm or 3ft.

Why is depth an issue when you’re swimming across a body of water? Well, it has to do with fluid dynamics.

Every motion swimmers make with their hands and feet generates small waves that bounce off the bottom of the pool. No movement creates more waves than the initial dive into the water. In shallower pools, these waves ricochet back to the swimmers on the surface, creating a more turbulent environment that hinders top speeds.

Jud Ready, a Georgia Tech engineering professor, told The Wall Street Journal that the shallowness is particularly pronounced at the end of the laps, with tumble turns creating mass disruptions to the water.

Ready also said there might be a psychological aspect to it as well, as competitors will feel as though they are going faster as they are used to being 3m off the floor, but in this case they are much closer than they are used to training in.

It doesn’t seem like a good move for the Paris Olympics to have one of its premier events taking place in suboptimal conditions, so why has this happened? 

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It all has to do with where the pools have been built. Rather than a purpose-built aquatic center, the Olympic swimming pool has been constructed at La Défense Arena – a rugby arena home to Racing 92 and in May hosted Taylor Swift's Era's tour for four nights. 

Building on top of a rugby pitch caused some issues for the construction team: “To go deeper, they would have had to do significant modifications, and structurally, there are some concerns,” explains John Ireland, the chief technical officer at Myrtha Pools, the Italian company that designed the pool for the last five Olympics.

Given these structural limitations, it begs the question: why have the Paris Olympic committee opted to house the swimming in a rugby arena – especially bearing in mind that it cost them £150 million ($192m, €178m) to do so?

Event manager David Navizet explained, as the Daily Mail reported, it was in an effort to avoid constructing a swimming arena that would only be used for one event.

Photo credit: Artem Verbo on Unsplash

“At the time of the bid, there was a plan to build an ad hoc swimming pool in Seine-Saint-Denis,” said Navizet. “There were a number of reasons for this change of direction: in the past, Olympic pools with a capacity of 15,000 have become white elephants because they are too big. La Défense Arena was the most reasonable and efficient choice, and the gymnastics were moved to the Bercy Arena,” he said.

Photo Credit: Andriyko Podilnyk on Unsplash

Thankfully, this will be the last year we will Olympic pools this shallow as World Aquatics enacted a minimum depth of 2.5 meters for swimming and water polo in January 2023, When Paris had its bid accepted for the Olympics in 2017 and the swimming facility was approved, regulations allowed for a pool of 2.2 meters.

Unfortunately for Paris, this little detail might just ensure its swimming events are lost to time.

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