Yep long time rower here and it is insane how much the shallow water slows you down. Conversely deep water is fast and feels amazing. Lucerne in Switzerland is a great place to race for this reason, it feels amazing. Conversely Lake Wendouree at Ballarat is horrendous, very shallow
It's the conditions these finely tuned athletes are living under in Paris. Sweltering heat, insufficient air-con, awful food, the wrong food, lack of transport from village to venue, awful cardboard beds, lack of available hydration - all those things are having a far greater effect than the shallowness of the pool.
The depth of the pool has been formally debunked by fluid dynamics engineers (3m vs 2.15m) as having any material impact the times (no more than 1 millisecond in this case). Impossible that this is the cause of significantly slower times.
