Swimmers racing in a car park — how can you not go and watch?

"Impossible is not a fact. It's an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It's a dare." Muhammad Ali said this and who'd dare argue with The Greatest?

- Rohit Brijnath

But impossible in sport isn't just a sublime feat, or a piece of revolutionary equipment. Sometimes it's just a building.

Like this gigantic, temporary, blue box constructed on a car park filled with 3.9 million litres of water. A piece of land in Kallang, where vehicles once stood stationary, is now a place where we will record movement in liquid during the World Aquatics Championships in July.

Incredible? But then sport has always been a place of magic and imagination.

Squash has been played outside the Great Pyramid of Giza and pole vaulters have rocketed down the city streets of Lausanne. In 2007, Rod Laver Arena, the centrepiece of tennis' Australian Open, was turned into a competition pool. One might say, these fields of play are occasionally out of this world. In 1971, the astronaut Alan Shepard took a modified six-iron and a few balls where he wasn't supposed to. He turned the moon into his private golf course.

Meanwhile, down on earth and inside the sparkling, new World Aquatics Championships Arena, Mark Chay is smiling as the media tour the site. Now he's co-chairman of the local organising committee, once he was an Olympic swimmer. Like basketball arenas, where the ball percussively strikes the wooden floor, pools also have a distinctive music. It's the constantly flowing water, or as Chay says, "it's the sound of swimming".