Sentosa competition venues ready ahead of World Aquatics Championships
SINGAPORE: A 37m-tall metal tower stands a stone’s throw away from the white sands of Palawan Beach on Sentosa island. At its foot is a circular blue pool 17m in diameter and 6m in depth.
Next to the structure, a blue pontoon stretches from the shore out onto the water, as huge vessels sit in Singapore’s famed anchorage in the background.
Four days away from the World Aquatics Championships, the Sentosa competition venues for high diving and open water swimming are ready to welcome the world’s top athletes.
The Championships, which features the six sports of swimming, water polo, diving, artistic swimming, open water swimming and high diving, will be held from Jul 11 to Aug 3.
Singapore will send its largest contingent to the competition this year, with a total of 72 athletes across five disciplines.
Mr Mark Chay, co-chairperson of the championships’ organising committee, noted on Monday (Jul 7) that the high diving tower is the first such structure to be built in Southeast Asia.
Male competitors will dive from 27m, while their female counterparts will dive from 20m, he said.
Mr Marcus Ng, project director at Innovez Engineering that built the dive pool, said that while it looks like a regular pool from the outside, it is anything but.
For one, the 21-tonne steel pool is made of 108 panels held together by 6,400 bolts. When filling it up with water, the depth meant that “there’s a huge force that's pushing out on every panel”, said Mr Ng.
“So what we did was we monitored the panels down to the millimetre every day, and the expansion was exactly to our engineers’ design. So we're very happy with that,” he said.
Mr Ng noted that the request was for the temporary pool to be installed quickly, and also dismantled quickly afterward.
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