Thanks. It's also half as wide as it is long and 2 meters deep. That still is not a useful comparison if the audience has never seen one. It's a comparison without a useful reference. I always thought it funny and nearly worthless for an author or announcer to describe the volume of something in terms of Olympic swimming pools as if everyone listening or reading had a useful frame of reference in that comparison.
People who’ve never seen one still understand that an Olympic-sized swimming pool is “quite big”. Which is the general impression people are trying to get across when they use that phrase.
People in the Olympics are the best athletes in the world. And I bet world class athletes need a big pool to compete in.
That gives you a pretty decent sense of the scale of an Olympic sized swimming pool without ever having seen one.
I agree that most people will decide that Olympic sized pools must be big but it doesn't give a layman any clue to just how large a volume they contain in some contexts where you find the comparison used.
For example, I made a comment about a similar comparison in a post here on HN a while ago because their example was simply ridiculous [0]. The author in that article referenced the volume of a large body of water as being "about 240 billion Olympic sized pools". I believe that they could've used almost anything else that most people would identify as being very large as a reference but instead they chose a large swimming pool. If an item is used as a reference the scale of the reference and the object should be chosen such that the reader could quickly understand that while one may be big, the other is bigger by some easily pictured amount.
The funny thing about Olympic-sized swimming pools is that they are so big that they are nearly useless except for the relatively rare elite swimming competition. So they are actually far more uncommon than you might expect, and are usually built with configurable “walls” so that they can be made smaller for everyday use!
That seems like hyperbole. They are certainly not a place where you can (easily) have fun playing around in the water, nor a place for beginners to learn to swim. However, they are still exactly right for anyone who can swim and wants to do some plain swimming.
The local 50 meter pool here is always filled with people young and old (and on no way elite) that just swim. You don’t need to be very fit to be able to swim 50 meters without a break.
It‘s a different kind of swimming compared to just hanging around and having fun, sure, but it always seems to be quite in demand when I see pools like that.
(The swimming complex close to me has two Olympic size swimming pools and one of those is open to the public, the other is used by actual elite athletes but also kids who are learning to swim. There is also a small 12.5 meter pool with adjustable depth to learn swimming and for aqua fitness courses.)
If you are in the US, you are lucky to live near such a complex. They are not common.
The NCAA only started to “recommend” that universities, when building new facilities, to make their competition pools Olympic sized in 1996.
Remember that Olympic pools are deep - usually a minimum of 2.15 meters - and don’t usually have ledges for assisting with egress. They are really dangerous. A person that gets into distress, especially near the middle, will find it nearly impossible to self-rescue. Without attentive guards/coaches/onlookers they are nearly certain to drown.
Olympic pools are amazing for casual swimming! The water has quite different dynamics, compared to a regular pool. Unfortunately they are expensive to build and operate, due to their size, so they are quite rare.
I treat myself to an Olympic swim every now and then, even though it means driving to the next city and expensive parking. Highly recommend it!
