InvestigationThey are called Christophe, Jacques, Constance or Karine and have in common to be addicted to swimming. The closing of the swimming pools during the health crisis made them aware of the importance that their pool lengths had acquired for them. A real drug, whose benefits these addicts claim.
It is a memory in black and white. One summer in Paris in the mid-1990s, Jacques melts under the roofs of a charcoal-gray building. A thousand times repentant drug addict, he was 32 when he fell back severely: “In a year, I spent all my money, I no longer paid my rent, I had an eviction procedure in the ass and I lost the right to visit my children. I freaked out. “ At the end of this umpteenth disaster, his sister lent him a maid’s room during the holidays. To occupy her days, she takes him to the swimming pool. The first time, emaciated in his swimming trunks, Jacques is ashamed of his “Zombie”.
He doesn’t want to go back, but his doctor strongly encourages him: “Do you have better things to do?” ” No. So he drowns his sorrow under the chlorinated waters of the Château-Landon swimming pool, in the 10e district of Paris. He takes a liking to lengths and calm. “It was twenty-six years ago”, he said on the terrace of a cafe at the 18the district of Paris. If, in twenty-six years, he remarried, changed careers ten times, resumed drugs, recovered from depression, quit drugs and eventually divorced, he did not. that rarely missed his daily swimming session.
1,300 swimming clubs in France
Thousands of French people are, like him, crazy about swimming pools, addicted to pools and dependent on lengths. Swimming is the most popular sport activity in the country after walking – there are more than 1,300 swimming clubs in France. These months of the first confinement plunged these swimmers into a state quite close to torture. What could their tiny sacrifice – no more lengths – weigh in the face of the paralysis of the country, the closure of shops and restaurants, the widespread teleworking? They waited silently and many, first deprived of a swim for such a long time, found out how addicted they were to the water.
“I was missing”, Christophe Clément concedes. This 37-year-old Parisian, computer scientist in a large company, swims for an hour, two to four times a week. This unique physical activity overwhelms him. In March 2020, he reluctantly took up running but, as soon as the swimming pools reopened, he gave up his sneakers for the swimsuit. “It was a period that was extremely difficult, he recounts. I found it unfair that the restrictions apply to swimming pools more severely than in other areas… ”
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