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The men's 100m freestyle swimmers start. AAP Image/Julian Smith
FINA had done the right thing in banning the use of high-tech, full-body swimsuits from next January. Now it needs to ban the records set at the World Championships, the last major event where the swimmers will wear suits made in part of polyurethane that so improve times that some of the records set at the tournament may last for years.
In a sense, the integrity of the world swimming records has already been violated.
Last year, 108 world records fell. So far this year, over 30 records have been broken, and some them totally shattered, like Ian Thorpe’s men’s 400m record, which the German Paul Biedeman beat in the World Championships.
Biedeman told reporters that he would not have got within two seconds of Thorpe’s seven year-old record without his Arena X-Glide suit: “The swimsuit helped me a lot.”
So a sport that has the elemental pleasures (or used to have it) of allowing competitors to swim against each other, and let the best man or woman win, has degenerated into a contest between various swimsuits.
Is this what FINA wants for its sport, a battle royale between Arena X-Glide, adidas Hydrofoil and the current version of Speedo?
I think not.
Administrative studipidity has allowed the swimsuit war to escalate to such an extent that the hardest decision a swimmer now has to make is whether to stay loyal to a sponsor whose suit might be a bit slower than a rival manufacturer, or make the switch?
We won’t get rid of this dilemma until next year.
Meanwhile, though, FINA could make less of a fool of itself by banning the world records at this Swimming World Championship.