Swimming: Building block to bigger team

Hayley Palmer celebrates qualifying. Photo / Photosport.

There is a forgotten hero in the qualification of a potential record number of New Zealand swimmers for the Olympic Games: the starting blocks.

At a cost estimated in excess of $70,000, Swimming Auckland, with the assistance of local community boards and sponsors, installed eight blocks at Auckland's West Wave aquatic centre just days before last month's national championships. The new blocks, which increased the height by 5cm to 68.5cm above the waterline, were expected to take around 0.3s off an athlete's time in most races - less so in backstroke.

The general reduction in times is because athletes spend longer in the air from a dive. At FINA-prescribed water temperatures (between 25- 28C), air is around 840 times less dense than pool water. Swimmers get greater height, more diving depth and increased initial velocity.

Heading into the Olympic qualifying meet, only four individual swimmers - freestyler Lauren Boyle, backstrokers Gareth Kean and Melissa Ingram, breaststroker Glenn Snyders as well as the women's 4x200m freestyle relay - had set A qualifying times for London.

The four extra individuals who qualified at the national championships - Hayley Palmer, Matthew Stanley, Natalie Wiegersma and, to a lesser degree, backstroker Daniel Bell - did so in events where they beat the Olympic A mark by less than 0.3s. Two relay teams in contention for Games invitations - the men's 4 x 100 medley and women's 4 x 100 freestyle - also received significant starting block benefits.

Palmer produced the exact qualifying time of 25.27s in the 50m freestyle while Wiegersma beat the 400m individual medley time by 0.01s and the 200m individual medley by 0.19s. Stanley beat the 200m freestyle mark by 0.25s. However, in his case, he would have qualified regardless of the blocks. He broke the 400m freestyle mark by 1.25s and set a new national record in the process.

Bell would not have gained the same advantage as the other three athletes. He started the backstroke from the water but a higher reach up to the blocks from the wall would have given him more leverage in his launch. With less of his body in the water, his resistance would have been reduced in the initial movement. Bell pipped the 100m backstroke qualifying mark by 0.01s.

The advantage of improved starting blocks is not to detract from the athletes' efforts; they were more of a complement to years of toil.

Stanley was grateful the blocks aided his hard graft at the Games qualifying meet where he also broke Danyon Loader's 200m and 400m freestyle national records.

"They were a great investment. It definitely helps, and even more so for sprinters like Hayley [Palmer]. Take away the blocks and we would potentially have fewer team members."

Swimming Auckland Executive Officer Brian Palmer, father of Hayley, convinced his board to authorise the blocks' installation: "They're all great athletes who have put their heart and soul into preparing for the Olympics. We simply didn't want them to feel as if those efforts had been wasted in less than world-class facilities. We couldn't change the pool but could improve the facilities. No athlete at the national championships could walk away and say their performance was impacted negatively. They had the opportunity to give their best."

Top international times tend to be set in pools produced for Olympic or world championship competition - like Beijing's water cube.

Such pools tend to be of a constant depth and deeper than normal at about 3m.

The West Wave aquatic centre has a constant depth of about 2m.