Who wants to save a pool? The one David Wilkie used to train in as a boy is up for sale. Neil Cochran, a former training partner of mine (and winner of two Olympic bronze medals, 1984), was also honed in them there waters by my dad. The pool in question is the art deco listed facility closed by Aberdeen City Council amid budget cuts in 2008 despite a campaign to save it.
The Bon Accord Baths in Justice Mill Lane may now be turned into a shopping mall, parking lot, games hall, bingo parlour. Who knows? Tragic in all senses. When I trained there many moons ago, the pool still had its original Turkish Baths and Public Baths (the kind you wash in as well as bathe and swim in), with all the original signs and plaques intact and even a faint whiff of carbolic soap in the air.
The Aberdeen council has appointed property consultants Ryden to handle the sale of the B-listed building. Suggestions for new usage include a concert venue, gallery, conference centre, theatre, shopping mall or food hall.
Gordon McIntosh, the council's director of enterprise, planning and infrastructure, told the Evening Express (see picture) up in the Granite City: "Exposing the site to the market gives others the opportunity to identify a viable future for the building which will bring it back into economic use. We are looking for positive and innovative ideas on how this can best be done."
I knew a doctor once who would swim the other side of the lane rope when we were training at 6am and then complain to the council that the swim squad was taking up too much space in the pool. A few years before, the same man wrote to Aberdeen City Council to complain about the presence of a boy "with a lane all to himself", a ludicrous waste of space said the learned gent for a swimmer who clearly "was never going to make it". That boy was David Wilkie.
He went on to win the 200m breaststroke at the 1976 Olympic Games; was the only non-American to win a men's event in Montreal and did so in 2:15.11... in 1976. One of the outstanding swims of the history of the sport. Wilkie was also winner of three world titles, two Olympic silvers and two world championship bronze medals.
We sincerely trust that the good doc in question applied a better standard to his medical judgments.
In more recent times, when Scotland did so fabulously well in the pool at the Commonwealth Games in 2006, you could hardly move for politicians shoving their way to the front of the queue to take plaudits and provide sounds bites for a media sold on the idea that this was some kind of home-grown success.
It was nothing of the kind, of course, beyond the fun had by the parents who produced the hard-working athletes some years before and handed down their heritage, the love, rearing and support of and by the same, and the attention of school teachers and swim teachers who pointed the youngsters in the right direction: south. The Scottish success - come the big day - was Made in England. Nothing wrong with that. Many a success story from the race pool around the world is made in the US.
Perhaps, though, if Scotland, lucky enough to have athletes such as Caitlin McClatchey, David Carry and Kirsty Balfour, whose hearts thump with pride for St Andrew, Haggis and the Highlands (God bless 'em all), saved a few more facilities such as Bon Accord - or replacing them with facilities as worthy as that one instead of building leisure slides and community facilities with no relevance to elite sport (I know of three pools built north of Hadrian's Wall in recent years that range between 18 and 23m...) - it might be able to boast a home-grown success in the race pool that it could be truly proud of.
