Joanne Jackson smashing world record one of many Ponds Forge highlights

It was announced last month that Ponds Forge, built as part of the city’s staging of the World Student Games in 1991, would remain closed until next April at the earliest because it cost too much to re-open in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

The swimming, diving and water polo clubs who use the facility lobbied hard for it to be re-opened and news came last week that Sheffield Council intends to throw the doors back open to the public. A formal decision will be made in a cabinet meeting on September 23.

The news will have been greeted by the hundreds who regularly use the facility with a mixture of relief and delight.

It should also warm the hearts of all those who have ever swum there, watched basketball there, played water polo at Ponds Forge, or as this correspondent has done on a number of occasions, reported on events there.

It should also lift the soul of one of this county’s most successful swimmers, Joanne Jackson.

The freestyle specialist from Northallerton enjoyed a decorated career, winning a bronze medal at an Olympics in Beijing, world championship medals in Rome and European Championship medals in Eindhoven and Budapest, but it was in Sheffield – in the pool at Ponds Forge – where she enjoyed arguably her greatest moment.

On the evening of March 16, 2009, the then-22-year-old North Yorkshirewoman broke the 400m world record in winning the British title.

That she beat Rebecca Adlington, who eight months earlier had captured the nation’s affections – and beaten Jackson no less in Beijing – was a mere icing on the cake.

In lowering the global mark, Jackson became the first Briton to hold the 400m world record since Hilda James more than 80 years earlier.

Her time of four minutes 00.66 seconds shattered the previous mark of European and Olympic 200m champion Federica Pellegrini by nearly a second and sealed her spot on the British team for that summer’s WorldChampionships.

She would go on to win world silver at the Foro Italico in Rome four months later.

“My aim was just to get another British record, but to come away with a world record is superb,” Jackson told The Yorkshire Post in the immediate aftermath of her world record swim.

“It was very close as it always is between me and Becky and it came down to the last five metres.

“I didn’t want to lose out to Becky again so I got my own back.

“It’s not really sunk in yet. My mum couldn’t be there because she was working but it was nice to look up and see my dad in the crowd. It was nice to break the world record in front of my home crowd.”

At Sheffield’s Ponds Forge no less.

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Thank you

James Mitchinson