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Sullivan slams suit changes

Roar Guru
25th July, 2009
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Australian world record holder Eamon Sullivan has slammed FINA’s decision to go back to textile swimsuits, comparing it to asking Roger Federer to play tennis with a wooden racquet.

Swimming’s governing body announced on Friday that from 2010 all racing suits must be made of textile, not polyurethane, and for men the race wear can only cover the waist to knee area.

Sullivan, who set his 100m freestyle world record in a soon-to-be-illegal Speedo LZR at the Beijing Olympics, says he has mixed views on the changes to come next year fearing times will become much slower.

“For me personally it’s a bit of sour grapes because some people don’t want the sport to get faster and its like telling Roger Federer to go back to a wooden racquet,” Sullivan told BigPond Sports Weekend.

“The new suits that have come out this year, the polyurethane suits they need to be gone. They are an impermeable material and that’s why the times have decreased so much more this year because towards the end of the race they are keeping you more buoyant so you are not fatiguing and sinking as much.

“It’s the American coaches that are putting forward these propositions because they believe that it’s out of control and in the first place it shouldn’t have happened, FINA shouldn’t have allowed this.

“They should have had clear guidelines to begin with and it shouldn’t have got to this point so it now becomes about winning races rather than breaking records.”

Sullivan believes men’s freestyle will now go back to the times swum by Russian great Alexander Popov or Dutch champion Pieter van den Hoogenband at the start of the century, when breaking 48 seconds was considered an exceptional swim.

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At the Rome world titles starting on Sunday it is expected Sullivan’s 47.05s world record will be broken, with several swimmers eyeing 46-second swims.

I think Popov’s world record was probably the last one swam in the one hundred freestyle before the introduction of the technology or maybe van den Hoogenband’s 47.8, which is about a body length in the suits,” said Sullivan.

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