Dear Editor, It is so good to see that we have won medals from the swimming team at the Pacific Games in the Solomon Islands.

The sad thing is that the swimmers were all trained overseas because we do not have a proper Olympic size swimming pool. 

Worse still, money is not the problem, but rather our people in the swimming fraternity have done little to get us a proper swimming pool. 

Indeed, they appear to have done nothing except to travel to swimming conferences overseas to talk swimming.

Many of the junior swimmers have used the swimming pool at Moana Sands for their past training and the majority train in the lagoon, which is what poor countries do. 

Many of the large countries in the world, the United States, China, Australia, Japan, and more would be willing to support and fund the building of an Olympic size swimming pool and for that matter, a full size gymnasium which goes together with a pool. 

All it needs are for our "leaders" in these sports codes to finally do something about it, ie . . . pull fingers out and work through our foreign affairs people to get the plans and project documents to give to the ambassadors in Wellington, that is why we have an Embassy/High Commission in Wellington. 

Iaveta Short