Swimming at the 1972 Summer Olympics – Men's 400 metre freestyle Swimming at the 1972 Summer Olympics – Men's 400 metre freestyle The men's 400 metre freestyle event at the 1972 Olympic Games took place September 1. This swimming event used freestyle swimming, which means that the method of the stroke is not regulated (unlike backstroke, breaststroke, and butterfly events). Nearly all swimmers use the front crawl or a variant of that stroke. Because an Olympic size swimming pool is 50 metres long, this race consisted of eight lengths of the pool. Rick DeMont of the United States originally won the gold medal in 4:00.26. Following the race, the International Olympic
King's Meadow swimming pool King's Meadow swimming pool King's Meadow swimming pool or Thames Lido is an open-air swimming pool or lido located in King's Meadow in Reading, Berkshire. It was first opened to the public in 1903 as the Ladies Swimming Bath and is believed to be the oldest surviving outdoor municipal pool of a similar early Edwardian era. In August 2004, as a result of a campaign, the building was awarded Grade II listed building status. It re-opened in 2017 after three years of restoration. The pool traces its ancestry back to 1860 as a bathing area. In 1879, Reading Corporation (now