BEIJING — From a distance, it looks like something you saw under a microscope in high school science class. Picture a boxed collection of red corpuscles, paint them aqua and make the group 580 feet long and 100 feet high — and you have the Water Cube, the weirdest, most futuristic and most spectacular swimming facility on the planet.
The headliner sport in these 2008 Olympics gets into the swim Saturday. Appropriately, the first prelim of the competition features Michael Phelps launching his quest for a record eight gold medals with the men’s 400-meter individual medley.
If he accomplishes the feat, the image forever etched in sports fans’ minds will be of Phelps’ elongated frame stretched on a backdrop of blue aqua bubbles. That’s fine with Phelps, who, like every other swimmer who trained here this week, has been blown away.
“It’s a top-of-the-line facility,” Phelps said. “It’s exciting when you walk into the pool. I can imagine the whole thing jam-packed and being loud.”
In a year in which 50 world records have been broken, more are expected to fall over the next nine days. While Speedo’s new LZR suit has received much of the credit, the Water Cube’s pool will get some kudos by Olympics’ end. It’s almost 10 feet deep, like the pools in Omaha and Sydney, where so many world records fell during Olympic trials.
The Water Cube also has an innovative gutter system in which backwash water runs through a two-stage filtration before returning to the pool, causing less wake, meaning better times.
However, what’s causing more jaws to drop here than at Tiananmen Square is an exterior and interior that are not only state of the art, but seem like art from a futuristic time.
“The outside was cool,” U.S. butterflyer Christine Magnuson said. “I wanted to run and bounce off the building. It was really fun. It is amazing to look up in the stands and look at how big the arena is.”
It seats 17,000, has a diving facility on one end and could comfortably hold a football field.
“It is gorgeous!” said Katie Hoff of the U.S. “The first night we came, it was at night and all the colors flashing across it, it was beautiful.”
The architectural firm PTW and the engineering group Ove Arup, both of Sydney, built the Water Cube with the help of the China State Construction Engineering Corp. and the CSCEC Shenzhen Design Institute. But the idea for the $200 million facility dates back to 1887, when English physicist Lord Kelvin asked the hypothetical question: What’s the most economical way to divide space into cells of equal size with the least surface area between them?
What they came up with here were 4,000 bubbles, some as long as 30 feet, made from a transparent “Teflon” material known as ETFE. They also went way past Kelvin in making the bubbles change colors. The square structure, Chinese officials say, works in harmony with the round Olympic Stadium, a.k.a. the Bird’s Nest, across the street.
This visual yin and yang is not lost on the swimmers.
“It’s like it’s out of a movie,” Colombia’s Camilo Becerra said.
John Henderson: 303-954-1299 or jhenderson@denverpost.com
