And so do you! One of my favourite things to do in London, if time and events align, is to take the DLR out to Stratford, get hopelessly lost around Westfield and eventually wash up at the London Aquatics Centre, aka the purpose-built swimming and diving facility from the 2012 Olympics. These days, it’s just another public pool and it’s run by Everyone Active, just like the utterly unremarkable and slightly run-down leisure centre in my home town. But this is far from unremarkable and run-down – it’s one of my favourite pools that I’ve ever been swimming in!
Everyone expected the London Olympics to be a massive flop but they actually went pretty well. Seems to be a pattern. I don’t pay a lot of attention to the Olympics but I vaguely remember that no one thought Paris would be ready a couple of summers ago and that was weeks of entertainment even for hardened non- sports fans. I have my very own picture of me being Yusuf Dikeç.
The legacy of the London Olympics lives on. Down my way, we’ve got the sailing centre on Portland (which I think predated the Olympics but got a bit of an upgrade – the local roads certainly did), Lee Valley White Water Centre is now the national home of paddlesports in the UK and London has the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, where the velodrome is still thriving, the Copper Box Arena is a world class basketball & netball facility, the hockey & tennis centre is a hub for local & national players, West Ham now have the iconic stadium and the Aquatics Centre is a spectacular pool complex that anyone can use.
It looks a bit like a blue whale beached in East London, a great rounded curved thing with bright blue glass panels in the side lying opposite the stadium. If you approach from Westfield, the first thing you’ll see is the great overhang and the blue glass curved walls of the gym at the top end, then you go down the stairs to the main entrance. During the Olympics, I think the spectators would have walked around each side and entered the stands directly through the blue glass sides.
Inside, besides the gym, there’s the 50m training pool divided more or less permanently into two shorter pools and with the adjustable floor set to 80cm deep. It’s alright. There’s nothing special about it and I probably prefer my own boring pool at home to it. At the opposite end are the diving facilities: four ordinary diving boards at one end, two low platforms and three high, dominated by the 10m Olympic platform, plus the unique dry diving facility, where you can train and practice by diving into foam instead of water
But the star of the Aquatics Centre is the competition pool, the massive 50m lane pool under the blue glow of the light coming through those big blue panels. They’re actually completely opaque, for all the light they let through – no free viewing from up there! The pool is glorious. It’s also a bit of an optical illusion: it’s twice the length of my home pool but three times as wide so my brain can’t really accept that it’s twice the length that I’m used to until I find my arms are aching in a way they don’t normally. There’s a diving block at each end of the ten lanes and they’re each labelled by speed. I swim in the slow lanes, the ones closest to the changing village side. I don’t know how deep the adjustable floor can go here but it’s usually set to 3m, which is a little deeper than I really like. There’s a ledge cut into the side of the pool at each end so you can stand up, and it’s thin enough at the far end that I can hook toes and heels in and not need my hands for balance.
I arrive at the Aquatics Centre whispering “I love this pool! I love this pool!”. That fades a little as I change in an undersized cubicle in the changing village, fail to find the toilets and showers without my glasses on and shower under a pathetic spray that lasts maybe five seconds each time you press the button but once I’m on the poolside, in this colossal blue leviathan of a room, I’m back to “I love this pool!”. The changing village is mixed, by the way – banks of lockers alternating with rows of private cubicles, women’s showers & toilets at the end nearest the door, men’s presumably at the far end.
I love that this is an actual Olympic competition pool where some of the best swimmers in the world have won medals – Michael Phelps (4 golds and two silvers), Missy Franklin (4 golds and a bronze), Ellie Simmonds (2 golds) and Katie Ledecky all won gold medals in this pool! – and here I am, on a drizzly Friday afternoon, ploughing up and down it as if i could ever be in their league. There are toddlers in the training pool having their first ever lesson. There’s a man with grizzled hair and beard in the next lane determinedly pulling himself along holding onto the side (who, honestly, looks like he might be safer in the training pool). There’s a man with fins warming up by moving upwards through the lane speed system. There are all kinds of swimmers here! I suppose if you’ve spent a lot of money on a very good pool, you might as well open it to the public to help it earn some of that money back but it still amazes me that we all get to swim in it!
There’s something just a bit special about a 50m pool anyway, even if it’s not an Olympic one. It drives me mad that the shiny new one in Winchester is permanently divided, or so it seems. If I’m in Reykjavik, I like to swim lengths at Laugardalslaug, which has a 50m outdoor geothermal pool (especially amazing in the snow!). It shouldn’t feel any different to swimming lengths at Sundhöllin, which also has an outdoor geothermal pool that you can swim in while being snowed on but Sundhöllin’s is only 25m and doesn’t have the same magic. It’s not like I swim differently – not like I’m putting on my Olympic speed or stamina (hahaha, you think i have Olympic speed or stamina??) but there’s definitely something psychologically different about a big pool and I like it.
One smallish thing I really like about the Aquatics Centre is that on each side of the diving pool is an electronic analogue clock face which is big enough that I can read it from the competition pool without my glasses on. If I wanted to time lengths (which I don’t), I could. At home, the clock is a tiny thing over the door at the deep end which I have to squint to read from the closest bit of the pool. It’s invisible from anywhere else. And although the timetable gives hour-long slots, there’s actually no one monitoring it. At home, the end of the session goes, the lifeguard blows the whistle and everyone reluctantly gets out, except the people who’ve just got in a minute or two early to be ready to go the second the next session starts. No way could I spend an hour and thirteen minutes swimming a mile (which I can do in 50-ish minutes in the medium lane of my local outdoor pool in the summer, when I’m in practice, for the record).
Oh, and it has one of those suit dryers for afterwards. I’m still inclined to see that as a bit fancy, an extra you don’t get at all pools; my mum goes “Yeah, we had one of those when I went swimming in the 60s” and looks at me like a millennial does when a teenager discovers Wonderwall. Pity there’s no way of drying my towel too, especially when it’s all going to get shoved in a drybag for the next 24 hours.
Downsides: the competition pool hosts a lot of competitions and events. At weekends in particular, it’s likely to be closed to the public and you should definitely check their events page before cheerfully turning up. That’s why I was there on a drizzly Friday afternoon and why I had to carry my wet stuff around for 24 hours: if I wanted to swim there on my London trip, its own calendar dictated that I be there at the beginning and not the end. It was £7.70 for admission, which is more than my local pool but not unreasonably more. And even though I have an Everyone Active account and card, it wouldn’t let me book online – I know EA sometimes gets difficult if you use different centres and sometimes won’t find your booking if you’re somewhere other than the centre your account was registered at. You’ll need either a pound coin or a trolley token for the locker but they’ll give you a token at reception – and I think that’s everything!
I Am A Polar Bear 