Are Canada's aging sports facilities limiting development of the next Summer McIntosh?

When it opened 50 years ago, the gleaming 50-metre pool at the Etobicoke Olympium was its crown jewel.

In historical photographs from the Toronto Star, preserved in Ontario’s digital archive, swimmers beam after the bright and shiny facility opened in 1976. That year, the pool hosted the Canadian national championship and aquatic events at the 1976 Paralympics.

A few years later, it’s where Victor Davis broke his own world record in the 200-metre breaststroke, a record he’d smash again at the 1984 Olympics.

Years after that, it was where swimmers like Olympic medallist Brittany MacLean and world-beater Summer McIntosh fell in love with the sport.

Now five decades old, the Olympium is showing signs of its age.

“We get the standard things where your feet get cut on the tiles,” said Marc Spackman, a British Olympian who serves as the head coach and director of swimming for the Etobicoke Swim Club. “We have things where the breathing becomes really difficult at different times of the year due to the heating in the building or whether it’s cold or not. You get swimmers cold walking down the deck because it's icy outside and so on.”

It’s a problem across the country. According to 2022 data from Statistics Canada, 50 per cent of the public indoor pools in Canada were built between 1970 and 1999, just like the Olympium. Many were built for specific events, such as the Canada Games.

Zoom into Ontario and that number jumps to about 56 per cent. The newest 50-metre indoor pools in the Toronto area were built in Scarborough and Markham ahead of the 2015 Pan Am Games, now more than a decade ago.

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