Plus, they are the worldwide foremost experts on competitive swimming. Definitely I would be more interested in their evaluation of a swimming pool rather than trust "research results" from the company that built the pool in question.
On swimming, sure. But not fluid dynamics. It's a bit like music listeners shouldn't be treated as experts on music quality, or you'll get the audiophile nuts who need gold connectors. Some combination of personal experience for comfort and objective measurements for performance would be much better.
Silver corrodes relatively quickly and is expensive; that's a bad tradeoff against copper, which is much cheaper and nearly as conductive. So: gold-plated connectors on copper wires are extremely common.
None of that makes an audible difference, as it turns out: humans can't tell the difference between silver, copper, gold, aluminum, or even iron wires at audio frequencies and realistic (sub-kilometer) lengths with comparable resistance. All the advantages are material costs vs longevity without maintenance.
Also, most music listeners are not experts on music quality or sound reproduction quality (two very different things). Many music listeners are experts on their own preferences. Everyone is entitled to their own preferences.
It’s not strange at all. Gold plating improving quality sounds truthy but is absolutely false. I have yet to read a serious study, at least single blind, showing any meaningful difference. And I have yet to read a serious engineering study showing any meaningful difference in characteristics. Steel plated jacks are just fine, and optical connectors make the whole thing irrelevant. As you write yourself:
> None of that makes an audible difference, as it turns out
> Also, most music listeners are not experts on music quality or sound reproduction quality (two very different things). Many music listeners are experts on their own preferences. Everyone is entitled to their own preferences.
Indeed. But their preference have no effect on Physics. If they are happy to get gold-plated ruthenium cables with diamond coatings, more power to them. It does not make these cables any better.
Theo are entitled to their own preferences, not their own reality.
Actually, gold is a worse conductor than both copper and silver, and only a little better than aluminum.
> and does not corrode in air
This is the real reason for plating contacts in gold. But gold wires would be a bad idea, since they would be worse than both copper and silver wires.
But they are very prone to psychological effects.
Some kind of placebo effect or fear of coming to close to the ground.
Many athletes are superstitious.
People are going absolutely as hard as they can.
There's no way an Olympic pool for the actual Olympics should be that shallow. If athletes prefer a deep pool, the pool should be deep.
Swimming is one of the premier sports at Olympics. It's also a facility that has one of the most reuse if built properly.
You don't think a Paris aquatic center wouldn't get tons of reuse in world championships and other types of top end level events if they'd built a fast pool
It's a mystifying decision. Especially since one of the standout athletes on the French Olympic team is a swimmer, and it appears that their decision now cheap out on the pool cost him a world record on the Olympic stage on his home soil
Firstly, if a swimmer were to wrongly worry about hitting the floor even if there is 0% that any of their races ever saw them go as low as this floor, it could be in the back of their mind that going as low as they usually do might cause them problems and therefore seem logical to avoid.
Secondly, humans are not perfectly rational machines. Many a football (soccer for any Americans) player has come back from a nasty injury and found themselves unable to play as boldly as they used to, even though the odds of getting injured haven't changed just their perception of it.
I do agree that if the athletes feel it's needed then they should be listened to, just explaining that it's possible for both things to be true, that the depth doesn't create any physical problems yet still lead to changed behaviour from the swimmers.
They didn't build a dedicated aquatic center. "The pool here in suburban Paris — a temporary vessel plopped into a rugby stadium"
Not necessarily. If they think the pool is slower, they’ll think they will have to swim for a bit longer, and may (possibly subconsciously) adjust their power output to allow for having something left when they have swum for as long as they think it would take them in a fast pool.
They don't have to outswim the bear. They just have to outswim the silver medalist.
Perhaps this is why its shallower than normal.
BTW, it's not clear the decision was purely monetary. Raising the water level means ruining the view of the closest seats. The spectators would be that much further away.
Edit: maybe I’m not making myself clear:
I don’t doubt they are slower in the current pool than they were before. But I doubt they can accurately tell you that it’s because of the pool depth. There are other factors that could also influence the performance, and I’m not sure the swimmers can accurately determine which factor is the primary difference.
Australia, as one example, took swimming (and a few other sports) next level with a plethora of studies on all things performance related.
Any theorectical results from, say, CFD, would be parallel tested in real conditions and|or modelled in a scale pool (like a wind tunnel for water).
Those who competed at that level in sport in the larger countries almost certainly heard first hand bleeding edge results from cutting edge sport science.
My niece was not fast enough to be invited to the trials this year (missed by .03 seconds in her favorite event), but her time would have put her into the second heat in Paris. She's the ~150th fastest person in the USA, but would have come in ~25th place in the Olympics. It's the same situation in China, Australia, Canada, UK, etc.
Most countries only have a small handful of elite swimmers. The power nations can each provide 20-50 swimmers fast enough to get to the semi-finals in every single event. They're analyzing and optimizing for everything. This is why most of the elite swimmers not from these countries go and train in the powerhouse countries. And why the powerhouse countries don't care that they do. I'd bet that 90% of all the medal winners this year do their training in 5 countries.
This is a weird standard. Out of 200 people doing anything, how many do you expect to set a personal record? Say you drive to the grocery store. Are you setting a time record for the trip more than 0.5% of the time?
It will get you a fair amount of the way there, but at some point you have to go and actually do the thing to validate your model.
The how can be argued
Would a large, blind empirical study be more trustworthy?
I am aware the above may be proportionality bias, but at the same time there is some kind of "reverse proportionality bias" at play here: the assumption that since the effect of a shallow pool are too small, they can't significantly affect the athletes. Human behaviours are very nonlinear, and even very small sensory inputs may very well "throw off" an experienced swimmer.
The gold standard would be an empirical randomized controlled trial to compare two pools, assuming you could hide “which pool” from the participants.
