Berlin, fill the pool! - You need more divers and swimmers!

Another European pool of sublime quality left to the sands of time. My gosh, what an asset! What a waste!

Here is an Alta Vista Babelfish translation: Eine andere europäische Lache der erhabenen Qualität verließ zu den Sanden der Zeit. Mein Mann, ein was für Anlagegut! Ein was für Abfall!

"White men can't jump" and British kids can't swim!

Hey Great Britain, here is a clue. Fill up your empty pools with water instead of graffiti.

Here is an article by the BBC which states that most British kids can't swim one length of a short course meters pool and that kids spend more time driving to the pool than actually swimming in it.

From the article: "...An Ofsted report said most 11-year-olds did not reach the national curriculum target of being able to swim 25 metres.

But some groups of pupils were missing out, including ethnic minorities with little experience of swimming.

Even among schools which had received extra money to boost swimming, [a] one in six attainment was "inadequate".

In these schools, the key factor was lack of time devoted to the subject.

In a quarter of the 12 local authorities visited, the way that swimming facilities had been centralised meant pupils spent more than twice as long traveling to the pool as they spent in the water. ..." [Fill your empty pools] [Link]

GB wants to fix that though and this article addresses their concerns and programs:

Here link to several empty pools in and around London. Warning, it's very depressing. [Link]

Why swimming in the United Kingdom is so anemic

In an article written by Joanna Coles for the New Statesman; a notable paper in the UK, Coles makes quite a provocative statement as to why the USA is so dominant in swimming. Coles gets a bit hyperbolic about kids swimming 'fly before they master reading but she includes this surprising statistic. From the second paragraph down:

"...Then there are the facilities, something one takes for granted here until you remember that the UK has only about 20 Olympic-sized pools for the whole country." [Link]

I can name four LCM pools alone that SCAQ swims in and this does not include the one in Santa Clarita, the Belmont Plaza, those two pools in Misssion Viejo, then there is UCLA, and, and, and... Poor UK!

I touched on this in an earlier post last April: [Link]