Laurentian swim club pushing to reopen university's pool

The Jeno Tihanyi Olympic Gold Pool at Laurentian University has been the home of the Sudbury Laurentian Swim Club for 50 years, minus the last four due to the facility's closure.

Originally, the pool was closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, however, it has been prolonged due to maintenance issues.

An image of the Jeno Tihanyi Olympic pool prior to its closure in 2020. (Supplied/Laurentian University)

In a letter to Laurentian University President Lynn Wells and City of Greater Sudbury Mayor Paul Lefebvre, the club is asking to participate in the joint planning committee.

"We’ve offered to help with the writing of grants, you know to governments, to help support financial costs to get it open," said Albrecht Schulte-Hostedde, the swim club's vice president.

"You know we’ve done it in the past, obviously, with buying all of the equipment that makes it a competing swimming facility and we just want to keep going with that."

The club said the pool is a vital piece of sports and community infrastructure that needs to be reopened as soon as possible.

"Of course it needs upgrades, no one is going to argue that, but at the end of the day, we need to get our swimmers back in that pool because we’re losing time with them and frankly our club along with any other aquatics clubs that use that pool," Schulte-Hostedde said.

"We’re declining in terms of membership, our financial capacity to pay the kinds of fees that the university is going to be asking us for is declining as each year goes by."

This pool is the only 50-metre Olympic-sized pool north of Toronto.

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Before the closure, the club hosted four to six swim meets a year, something they can no longer do.

"We did a rough calculation that we were bringing in over a million dollars a year to the city in terms of the people coming to the swim meets, staying in the hotels, shopping and that was conservative."

In a statement to CTV News, Wells said:

"We have received the letter from the Sudbury Laurentian Swim Club and very much appreciate their passion and interest. Community groups like theirs are critical to the success of any community facilities and we are glad to know the swim club is here to help. Support from community partners will be an important element of any plan to reopen the Jeno Tihanyi Pool."

Mayor Paul Lefebvre said the city and the university have only met one time since Wells took over at the school and many things were discussed.

"We talked about a number of different things at Laurentian and certainly that came up. They have their own issues with respect to their creditor protection place that they’re in and we’re doing our own review as well," Lefebvre said.

"We all know that that pool is a key infrastructure of our community. So basically now, we're going to have in the fall our own report back about our own infrastructure as a city, right? How do we go about doing something there? And, certainly, it's not ours, it's Laurentian's."

While reopening the pool isn’t listed in the university's annual budget for this year, the board of governors said in February there are plans to bring the pool back into usability within the next five years.