NEARLY 30 years ago, I was the Northumberland and Durham county champion in my age group for the 400m individual swimming medley, and so I can fully understand the disappointment that Susan Rolph expressed in The Northern Echo yesterday.

She has just returned to the North-East after failing to reach the Olympic 200m individual medley final in Sydney. She is disappointed because she feels that lack of facilities in the North-East prevented her from fulfiling her potential. There is not a 50 metre Olympic-sized swimming pool between Leeds and Edinburgh, and she has to train in a standard 33-and-a-third metre pool.

Back in my day, we called them 36-and-two-thirds yard pools. But the problems were still the same - although I can never claim to have had either the ability or the application to reach Susan's level.

The county champions gathered for the national championships at the Derby Baths in Blackpool - a 55 yard pool, although there's now a hotel on top of it. And I felt like a fish out of water.

I usually came around tenth in the nationals, sometimes scrapping into the final eight, sometimes just missing out. Perhaps I would have done better if I had had experience of a 55 yard pool every day in training.

Non-swimmers might struggle to understand the problem. The best way I can explain it is to compare it to tennis where someone who has spent the year playing on clay courts will always have difficulties in adapting to Wimbledon's grass surface. Tennis is exactly the same game whatever surface it is played on - only there are huge differences!

In my home pool in Stockton, it took three lengths - and so two turns - to complete 100m. There in Blackpool it took two lengths and so one turn.

Swimmers know to the stroke when the turn comes. And so, after 36-and-two-third yards, I was waiting for the turn - even though I knew it wasn't due for another 18-and-a-third yards. I wasn't comfortable in the bigger pool, I wasn't at home in it and so there was no way I could win. I am sure that's how Susan must have felt in Sydney.

Facilities have improved enormously since my day, but they still have a long way to go, which is why The Northern Echo's A Sporting Chance series highlighting the issue is so timely.

For while our facilities will continue to improve over the next ten years, countries like the US and Australia are already way in front of us and they, too, will continue to improve their facilities.

It all makes the £600m spent on the Millennium Dome look even more foolhardy. How many Olympic-sized pools could that £600m have bought for the North-East?

It would have been a better way to commemorate the millennium by building something useful for this and future generations - and perhaps we would have won a swimming medal in the millennium Olympics.

I PROBABLY was a swimmer with the potential of Eric the Eel rather than Susan Rolph.

Eric the Eel was the chap from Equatorial Guinea who struggled in last, by a long way, in his heat. But for him, just reaching the end of the pool was a triumph and his name will be remembered far longer than the names of some swimmers who triumphed by winning gold.

I think my first memory of athletics, for instance, is of Jim Peters in the marathon at the 1954 Commonwealth Games in Vancouver. He entered the stadium 20 minutes ahead of the rest, but clearly the heat was getting to him. He staggered and reeled, refusing all help in fear of disqualification, before collapsing 200 yards from the line. From there, he was rushed to hospital without a medal.

It was his attitude that impressed me, and I have often thought since that winning can be easy compared to the struggle just to take part