Dissimilitudes: 50 Meter Pools

Right! I'm determined to make something of this blog, so here we go. This is -hopefully - the first in a series of posts discussing some of the differences between life in Sydney and in Dublin.

Perhaps people reading this are Irish people thinking of making a visit to Sydney, or Australia. Perhaps you're Aussies thinking of visiting the Emerald Isle. Either way, forewarned is forearmed. Read this series or articles and you'll have everything you need.

First off, a subject which has recently become dear to my heart: Olympic Sized Swimming Pools.
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For those of you completely unfamiliar with the sport, an Olympic sized swimming pool is one which is 50 metres from end to end and 10 lanes wide. As an aside, the outer two lane are not used during competitive events.

According to this wikipedia entry: Ireland has a total of two Olympic sized pools - count them, two! Even a UCD student with his mittens could count that high! One is in Limerick and one is in Dublin. There is also a 50 meter pool in Clontarf, but that only has 6 lanes and belongs to a private health club.

By contrast, in Sydney, there are 5 public Olympics sized pools, within walking distance of my apartment. They typically cost lest then AU$5 enter and they are the bee's knees! I've got a touch of Achilles Tendinitis, so my running has been severely curtailed. Instead, to avoid getting fat, I've voraciously attacked the pools. I go swimming two or three times a week and and I'm to 30 lengths of the pool; for those Irish reading this that's 1.5 km, not 750m. I think it's fantastic exercise.

I can't find a reference to when the Irish pools were built, but I can tell you that 10 years ago there were NO full length pools in Ireland. None. Nada. Zip. Zilch. A big fat Zero. How do I know this? Well...

In 1996, a young Irish swimmer named Michelle Smith, unexpectedly won 4 medals, including 3 golds at the Atlanta Olympics. According to her Wikipedia page: She was single-handedly responsible for Ireland's second largest ever medal haul at one Olympics.

In interviews following her wins, she publicly shamed the Irish sporting authorities for having no full sized pools in Ireland. The Irish government, reactive as always, immediately went away to start work on the previously mentioned pools.

Of course since then, Ms Smith, now better know by her married name, Michelle de Bruin has received a 4 year ban for drug test irregularities. The fickle Irish media have since seemed to disown her. I can't verify if this is true, a friend of mine reported to me that in a recent RTE broadcast on Ireland's Olympic successes, the medal count for Atlanta showed zero medals won.

It's as if she never existed.

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Blogger just ate most of my post. I had to re-write it. I remember now why I stopped making so many entries.