By Dan Airth, Swimming World Contributor
Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of living in Benin as an English teacher for 10 months. Benin is a small, French-speaking country next to Nigeria in West Africa. Cotonou, the capital city, is surrounded by water on three sides: the Atlantic Ocean, Lak Nokue and a small inlet that connects them. As a competitive swimmer growing up in California, I saw the potential for Cotonou to be a home for competitive swimming, but like most impoverished countries, this is not the case.
The local government made swimming a focus of its national development in 1982, when they opened the door to China to finance an Olympic training complex. The $10 million project included a 35,000 seat soccer stadium and was dubbed Stad de l’Amitie (Friendship Stadium). The aquatic facility is comprised of three pools: two 50-meter lap pools and a 5-meter deep pool with 10-meter diving platform. When finished, it was the first Olympic-sized pool in West Africa.
Today, it is still open to the public but there are hardly any funds to maintain it. Only one of the lap pools is open while the others sit half-full of rain water making the whole facility look derelict. Unfortunately, the esplanade around the “Stad†has also gone downhill and is mostly a place to loiter and engage in petty crime.
In the past 33 years, there have been several attempts to improve the swim facility but unfortunately this has only made it age less gracefully.
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