Australian coaches are considering banning the controversial swimsuits that contributed significantly to the rewriting of the record books before and during the Beijing Olympics, a report by Jacquelin Magnay, senior sports writer for the Sydney Morning Herald, tells us today.
The coaches met at the World Cup in Sydney last weekend and are preparing to make a recommendation to Australian Swimming's board on the suitability of the suits, including the Speedo LZR that has catapulted the sport into a new era of speed this year. The suit is expensive and lasts for few swims, according to the experience of athletes. Some Australian coaches wish to follow the USA of banning the use of such high-tech swimsuits by age group swimmers under 12. Other coaches want the swimsuit banned altogether and favour a return to the position advocated last week by SwimNews.
Australian head coach Alan Thompson told Magnay: "We are having discussions about it and doing further investigations looking at FINA's approval, the rule book and the suits in general and canvassing the philosophies in swimming whether it is good or bad. Hopefully we can come to some sort of position by the end of the year."
Magnay notes that the issue may yet have a bearing on the race for the FINA presidency, with incumbent president Mustapha Larfaoui, of Algeria, and FINA treasurer Julio Maglione, of Uruguay, under pressure take a stand on the suits.
The issue has dominated the sport since the launch of the LZR in February. Magnay notes: "Dr Joel Stager of Indiana University found that, mathematically, the Beijing Olympic 100-metre men's freestyle time would not have been reached for another 16 years, if not for the suit. He also found 60 of the all-time top 100 times were swum in 2008 since the Speedo suit became available. Statistically he found the improvement of times was between 1.3% to 2.6%."
That range of improvement coincides almost exactly with more than 400 performances across the range of speed and talent seen among swimmers in the LZR at the World Short-Course Championships in Manchester in April this year, when the man at the helm of Speedo, Pentland boss Stephen Rubin was the head of the organising committee of an event that served as a platform for what has been a very lucrative product for the swim suit maker. Rubin made his money in the 1980s and 1990s, when an investment in a then little-known sports shoe-maker, worth the cost of a couple of small houses in the south of England, turned into a return of some £400m. The shoe-maker? Reebok.
According to the Sunday Times Rich List in Britain, Rubin's London-based Pentland Industries group, made £4.9m profit on £380m sales in 2002 and its net assets were then worth £272m. The LZR has done much to boost the company's position.
However, that it boosted performance too is not in doubt. "The swimsuit no doubt helped people," Thompson tells Magnay. Veteran coach to Shane Gould and generations of others, Forbes Carlile, a sports science pioneer in the sport, has called for a standard suit that neutralises the weighty effect on performance that the sport has seen from the LZR and other suits this year. "The future harm which is being done by this suit - the prohibitive cost and exclusivity of use, even without addressing moral and ethical considerations, is great," Carlile told Magnay.
