Sport & Fitness

Aileen Riggin was only 14 years old when she won a gold medal for springboard diving at the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp. At a mere 1.4m tall and weighing just 29.5kg, the stress of competing – in an outdoor moat filled with cold, muddy water – was the least of her worries. ‘I had another mental block,’ she later explained. ‘It was about sticking in the mud at the bottom. I kept thinking: the water is black and nobody could find me if I really got stuck down there. If I were coming down with force, I might go up to my elbows and I’d be stuck permanently, and nobody would miss me and I’d die a horrible drowning death.’ Yikes! Sounds like a suitably chilling subject for a short film… Feature continues

Two years later, Riggin did indeed perform for the camera – though in less murky surroundings. She was the subject of the first sub-surface and slow-motion swimming films, demonstrating that swimming is about far more than merely manoeuvring oneself through water. It also requires a sense of whether that water is a hostile opponent or a generous ally, and how to benefit from or struggle with its buoyancy, fluidity and density – the properties that allow us to float, to flow and to swim. Thus was born a genre which many movie buffs believe reached its apogee with the 1968 Burt Lancaster classic ‘The Swimmer’ – described in the ‘Time Out Film Guide’ as ‘a largely loony but oddly compulsive allegory in which Lancaster, clad only in trunks, makes his slow way home by swimming through various people’s pools.’

On Friday, ‘The Swimmer’ launches a three-day open-air festival entitled ‘Dive-In Movies’ to mark the centenary of Tooting Bec Lido and its resident South London Swimming Club. Saturday’s offering on a giant inflatable screen is the glamorous ‘Million Dollar Mermaid’, staring Esther Williams with spectacular aquatic choreography from Busby Berkeley, while Sunday is devoted to a programme from the producers of Future Shorts in which the Lido is transformed into a retro leisure area with films, theatre, interactive installations and 1920s period costume.

Alongside the main features will be archive newsreels recalling the glory days of British lidos.After decades of neglect and under-funding, just 12 outdoor pools remain in London. As the excellent website www.lidos.org.uk reveals, a further 58 are now little more than a memory.

However, a renaissance is well underway, spearheaded by the London Pools Campaign. London Fields Lido is set to reopen in October and five others could be salvaged. It’s to Tooting Bec, and its allies the South London Swimming Club, that others look for inspiration. An edition of Radio 5 Live’s Breakfast Show came from the water’s edge last Tuesday – just 48 hours before the LPC’s Golden Goggles awards (see also Reporter, p13) named it as the capital’s ‘best outdoor swim’ and ‘a model for lidos everywhere’ due to its well-preserved original features and size. At 100 yards, it’s nearly twice the length of an indoor Olympic-size pool – of which London, famously and shamefully, has only two.

Tooting Bec has one further cinematic connection. Six years ago, Brad Pitt was there to film scenes for Guy Ritchie’s gangster flick ‘Snatch’. Sadly, unlike everyone attending this weekend’s festival whose admission ticket includes a celebratory dip, he didn’t take the plunge.

‘Dive-In Movies’ runs from Fri-Sun, 7pm, at Tooting Bec Lido, Tooting Bec Rd, SW16 1RT. Tickets £14 from 08707 550061/www.picturehouses.co.uk.

Watery raves
Five other ‘swimming’ films that would have been worth showing

Stoned
Watch out for the floater… Leo Gregory plays ill-fated Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones in this recent British film that argues that Jones’s death in his own Sussex swimming pool was no accident.

Dogtown and the Z-Boys
The dry, empty swimming pools of 1970s Santa Monica are the stars of this energetic skateboarding doc as long-haired local kids learn new tricks by breaking into the back gardens of their richer neighbours.

Sunset Blvd
All is not well at the home of faded Hollywood diva Norma Desmond, as the corpse floating in the pool could testify – as in fact he does, thanks to a cunning narrative twist.

Sexy Beast
A colossal boulder crashing into the pool of ex-lag expat Gal (Ray Winstone) turns out to be a mere hors d’oeuvre for the disruption visited on his scorchio villa by demonic London hardman Don (Ben Kingsley). But the damaged pool might offer an escape plan too...

Caddyshack
Watch out for the floater, part 2… chaos reigns (again) in Harold Ramis’s country club farce when a chocolate bar is mischievously deposited in the pool; its turd-like progress is accompanied by the theme from ‘Jaws’.