Welcome to the WaterCube
The Water Cube looks cool. It's supposed to be ecofriendly too. Let me tell you what it means to the meet. First off, it's indoors again. Athens, like Barcelona, was an outdoor pool. They intended for it to be indoors but ran out of time. With all the news about the poor air quality the athletes will be dealing with, indoors is a good thing. Swimmers are used to breathing chlorinated and filtered air, so indoors is good.
You're going to see a lot of video and hear a lot of talk about Michael Phelps, and one of the things they will focus on is his streamlines. Off the blocks and walls he goes deep and dolphin kicks to propel himself through the water. Back in the day there were a handful of pioneers of this technique like Berkoff, and now in every event swimmers must surface before 15 meters off the wall. Though Phelps does excel at this technique, many others use it these days like Ryan Lochte and Natalie Coughlin. What's the point of all this? At Worlds in Melbourne last year, the temporary pool they built was 3 meters deep.
UPDATE: The Beijing pool was not built to the old standard of 2m. Instead it's the new depth being used in major competition of 3m, allowing swimmers using this technique to be even more effective with it, but this will benefit all swimmers giving them less chop to swim through especially as they approach the walls.
I don't know what the lane lines are going to look like, but I hope they have three yellow lines in the middle for lanes 4 & 5. This is definitely a good enhancement for television viewing.
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