Sharp Enough in Sandwell (Race Report from Pool #794)

10 May 2026

I’ve been too busy with work and life while trying to squeeze swimming into the former to writeup my racing and the great 2022 Birmingham Commonwealth Games pool, the Sandwell Aquatics Centre, which became pool #794 on my #1001Pools list.  I was up there on Sunday, May 10^th, for their first ever Masters meet and, other than a brief episode after my 200 freestyle, had a great day.

I always love swimming in a “games legacy” pool, having enjoyed swimming in:

• Multiple Canada Games pools - New Westminster (#173 for the 1973 event**), Halifax (#433 built for the 2011 event), Saint John, New Brunswick (#434 built for the 1985 event), and London, Ontario (#633 which was actually built in 1991 but then re-christened as a Canada Games facility when the city hosted the 2001 event)

• Three Pan Am Games pools in Canada - the most awesome Toronto Pan Am Sports Centre with their training pool (#216) and competition pool (#449) along with the Markham Pan Am Centre (#405)

• Four Olympic Games pools

• The Etobicoke Olympium (#410) which was built for the 1976 Paralympics

• ... and Sandwell is, I think, my fourth Commonwealth Games pool (prior include Manchester, Edmonton, Victoria) … with a near miss of the 1954 Vancouver games pool

I love them first because they were generally world-class at their time; I also love the concept of these facilities giving back to their local and the broader swim communities for decades to come.

Sandwell did not disappoint

• 10 lanes, of which six were used for racing with lanes 0 and 7 kept free and lanes 8 & 9 open throughout the event for much-needed continuous warmup and cool-down

• It was set for a constant two-meter depth, but they had movable floor sections at both ends (if memory serves)

• Plenty of deck space for the turnout so we could all sit on the deck, with a decent amount of spectator seating. 

• A separate diving well … which, unfortunate for pool-hound me, was not open so I couldn’t notch up a second tank on the day.

  
  

Here’s how the racing went.

• 200 free - 2:14.62 vs

  • 2:06.75 Masters best from 2014

  • 2:12.66 from a rested/shaved meet last summer at Manchester

  • … but, based upon my 400 at Aldershot where I was 7 seconds above my 2025 best time, I figured I would be happy with any time under 2:16 (e.g., 3.5 seconds faster than my Manchester result) ... so I was quite chuffed with this

• 100 fly – 1:07.71 vs

  • 1:02.34 Masters best from 2011

  • 1:07.62 Masters 55+ best from 2022

  • 1:09.67 Best since moving to the UK

  • This felt like my best race of the day - smooth enough speed on the first 50 with a lot of energy to power through the second 50

• 200 fly - 2:33.41 vs

  • 2:19.09 Masters best from 2011

  • 2:33.57 best in the last decade (2016)

  • 2:34.71 last time I swam this in February 2020, right before the Covid-19 lockdowns

  • The 200 fly long course is by far the scariest pool race, so I was very conservative through the 150 and then just tried to hold on to finish. While the time is not great when compared to my younger days, I was pleasantly surprised with the result.

The other fun, ego-boosting thing they did at this meet (which I have seen at a few other Swim England masters meets) was to use an "age-adjusting" algorithm to be able to rank all swimmers, regardless of age. Based upon this, I "won" all three of my events, with the biggest feed to my vanity being the 200 freestyle ranking:

In today's algorithm-driven world, this is one I can get behind! I don't recall my exact fastest ever 200 long course free from my youth (as I tended to focus on the 400-800-1500 frees and 400 IM at peak meets), but it would not have been faster than 1:57+.

As for the “episode,” this happened as I was cooling down after my 200 free.  I had done 300 meters of my planned 400-500 easy when the alarms went off in the pool area, which we later learned were facility-wide. 

“Evacuate the building,” were the words over the loudspeaker and the lifeguards were rushing us to get out of the pool and outside.  

I was a little slow on the uptake, but also didn’t exactly rush as I wanted to get as toweled off as possible before heading into the maybe 10-12C weather outside … shoeless because I had left my deck shoes behind the blocks, but my towel, gym shorts and t-shirt were at the far end of the pool.  If I wasn’t still pretty het up from the racing, it would have been quite cold outside, but I wasn’t alone in my state of less-than-ideal dress.  Nor in my frustration with the situation.  Fortunately, whatever it was that happened (I never learned) was resolved in about 30 minutes, though we seemed to lose about 45 minutes on the timeline for the day what with getting everyone back into the building and restarted.

All-in-all, it was a great day.

** Apparently, this pool sprung a major leak in 2021 and has since been demolished. I swam there in August 2014.