Clive wrote to uk.transport.london on Fri, 8 Jul 2005:

In message , Nick Cooper
writes
As a nation we are desperately short of world-class sport facilities, not
just for holding events, but for training. It's five weeks from the
Commonwealth Games trials, and British swimmers are having to fly
out to Slovenia, because there aren't enough decent places to train
here, FFS! There are only twenty 50-metre swimming pools on
nineteen sites in the entire country - Berlin alone has more than that.
Australia had 1,600 in total, 45 of which are full Olympic standard.
--
So how many swimmers are we talking about in what number of people?

Rather more when they have facilities to train.

Look, you're making the common mistake of a non-athlete (okay, I'm
making a sweeping assumption here, and may well be wrong about you) in
thinking that only those people who actually make it to their world
championships are involved in the sport. For every one who does, there
are probably several hundred, if not a thousand good club swimmers/
skaters/riders/footballers/track and field athletes/whatevers who have
no ambitions to do that, but are happily competitive against athletes of
their own age group and standard. Some of them are very good indeed,
others, like myself, pretty dreadful - but all of us have enormous fun,
keep fit, and enjoy getting as good as we can.

The more facilities we can provide, the larger the base of athletes who
will use them, and the more world-class athletes we might throw up - and
this is actually a "virtuous circle", since the more world-class
athletes we *do* produce, the more people decide to try their particular
sport.
--
"Mrs Redboots"
http://www.amsmyth.demon.co.uk/
Website updated 23 May 2005