It takes 32.18 laps to equal a mile in an Olympic sized swimming pool. The reason the number of laps in a mile is not an even number is because the standardized Olympic pool size is in meters.
A standard Olympic pool is 50 meters long. One length of the pool is considered one lap. Because there are 1609.34 meters in a mile, it would take slightly over 32 laps to swim a mile. At the Olympic games, the longest event, excluding the marathon, is a 1500 meter race, which consists of an even 30 laps. The marathon event, which is 10 kilometers, takes 200 laps to complete.
