The Olympic Water Cube is a green, energy saving, engineering marvel.  Yes, yes, that’s nice, but did you know - it uses Ozone and UV sanitation instead of chlorine to keep its water clean?

It is estimated that up to 20% of swimmers have asthma.  So a pool that cuts out the chlorine to reduce asthmatic effects can only help athletic performance.  And if it helps reduce the chances of children developing asthma from swimming over the years, so much the better.  So from a health point of view, the Beijing Olympic pool is anti-asthmatic.

For sanitation, the pool will rely on a combination of sanitization and filtration types: ozone, zeolite, coarse sand, aeration, high capacity UV disinfection and only a very small amount of chlorine for residual.  This should also do a good job of removing environmental toxins such as silver, mercury, cobalt and arsenic. A good idea given environmental toxicity concerns.

That may not seem like such a big deal, but having asthma affects performance and general well being.  For these Olympics, Peter Vanderkaay, Dara Torres and Jessica Schipper and Park Tae-Hwan are just some of the swimmers with asthma.  And in 1972, the US swimmer Rick DeMont had his gold medal in the 400 meter freestyle taken away because of testing positive for a banned asthma medication and was disqualified from another event.

Ironically, some youngsters take up swimming to help with asthma and others develop asthma over the years.  Either way, it only makes sense to use a method of water sanitization that does away with the asthma inducing effects of chlorine, and that is exactly what the Water Cube pool does.

Competitive swimmers spend a huge amount of time in pools.  Which means, they have a huge potential exposure to the effects of chlorinated water.  The problem is that chlorine reacts with body debris like sweat, skin flakes and ammonia causing the chlorine to turn into trihalomethanes and other respiratory irritants that sit above the water where they are breathed in.  In closed natatoriums, that problem tends to be even worse than in outdoor pools.  Adding to the complexity is the increasing evidence that different people are able to detoxify chemicals in their systems more (or less) efficiently than others.

Studies have found higher rates of asthma in swimmers who train regularly and in people who work as lifeguards or around chlorinated pools.  Research has shown that breathing these chemical can contribute to the development of asthma.  This is particularly the case in indoor pools.

Chlorine exposure during childhood happens at a time that is particularly important for development of the lung.  And most swimmers start early and swim for many years.  In fact, researchers have found that exposure to chlorinated water before the age of 6 corresponded with higher rates of asthma at age 11 whether or not there were symptoms in the meantime.

So even though some folks question the high rate of asthma in swimmers and wonder about athletes just using asthma medications to get a performance edge, there really are scientific reasons that point to chlorine exposure and airway reactivity as being a real problem.  If you are competing against the likes of Michael Phelps, you need normal lung functioning, and the best asthma medications in the world might just bring you up to even if you have asthma.

Luckily, there are some methods that drastically reduce the need for chlorine in pools.  The two main alternative methods are ozone and UV sanitation.  Europe has been using ozone filtration since the 1950’s.  In the US, we are just catching up.

We think it would be great, actually, if all pools were chlorine free.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!