OUT OF THEIR DEPTH

The city's new £10 million Quays leisure complex was due to host its first top sporting event with the UK'S Winter National Diving Championships this month.

But the event has been moved to Sheffield because the ten-metre platform board is one metre too narrow for Olympic synchronised diving.

Now Quays bosses are waiting to see if they will get a £50,000 Lottery grant to bring the board up to the necessary standard.

Quays bosses claim synchronised diving was brought into the Olympics for the first time in Sydney this September, four years earlier than they expected.

But now there are calls for an investigation into why leisure bosses built the diving platform too narrow in the first place, when they knew that within four years the sport would become part of the Olympics.

But Lindsey Fraser, Quays' development officer, said the pool was designed and built before synchronised diving became an Olympic sport.

She said it was only added to the programme for Sydney 2000 last March, by which time the Quays was built and in final preparation for its official opening in June.

She told The Daily Echo: "We expected synchro to be in for 2004.''

Southampton's own 18-year-old synchronised diving star Peter Waterfield is set to fly the flag for Britain in Sydney.

The Quays 10-metre platform board is only two metres wide, rather than three metres which is required by the international swimming organisation FINA.

Councillor Julian Price, chairman of Southampton City Council's leisure services committee, said: "We are submitting a lottery bid to improve the facilities for diving in Southampton.

"When we built the Quays, the swimming and diving complex was completed to current specifications.

"Since then the international federation has changed them.''

See Comment page 10 and page 34 of tonight's Daily Echo.

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