Only by January 1, 2010, will swimming return to pre-2008 standards of fairness on suits. SwimNews can reveal tonight that a death knell has been sounded for non-permeable materials in the debate over how much further suit rules need to be tightened to rid the sport of performance-enhancing devices.

From January 1 next year, suits will have to be made of permeable material (the definition of which is still to be refined) from strap to ankle, while a change to the maximum body cover of suits may follow well in time for London 2012 if the advice of coaches and swimmers' representatives is adopted by FINA. Senior sources say that those at the helm of the international federation are now minded to follow that advice.

If they do, the Speedo LZR and all that followed it will be gone and swimming as we had known it would have been resurrected, while a professional suit-testing and rules regime would be in place and well-established by London 2012. That would be to the credit of some in FINA and to the credit of coaches, athletes and others who have worked towards that goal.

It was obvious from the world s/c championships in Manchester 2008 that the Speedo LZR had caused a seismic shift in the extent to which suits aid speed, buoyancy and endurance. The riot of suits that went beyond the LZR in the wake of Beijing and the debate that ensued convinced FINA to do an about-turn: the suits were significant after all - and undesirably so.

The timing of the turn around was phased- and swimming will continue to pay a price for the rest of 2009, it seems, though Rome 2009 may no longer be quite the circus it was heading towards. Some argue that a little performance enhancement is just as bad as a lot, in the sense that a smoke struggling to get off the weed may say 'well, I'll just one or five instead of 20 a day".

Speaking to Nicole Jeffery at The Australian, Alan Thompson, head coach and a member of the FINA suits commission, said: "It's a very tight time frame, it's not ideal, but it's better than a free-for-all." That 'not ideal' is a significant step. Thompson is a head coach to a Speedo LZR team and he says that is not ideal. He would rather be a head coach to a Speedo team that wears great equipment but equipment that does not detract from the achievements of swimmers and coaches. 

Meanwhile, Grant Stoelwinder, coach to Eamon Sullivan - who set the 50m and 100m world records in the LZR last year - believed Rome 2009 would be "a little bit fairer". He told Jeffery that Sullivan had been worried about having to race againt the Jaked01s and arena X-Glides of the world. In the same way, perhaps, that those sprinters who could not get access to a LZR for trials and championships and even the Olympic Games last year might have worried about a man who had re-written the record books in a LZR (legally, and that's the difference, of course).

Stoelwinder acknowledges as much when he says: "But this ruling will calm him down, and it may have the opposite effect on some of his competitors. I am just glad we have some clarity. This second wave of technology was a big problem. Now it looks like there will be pretty even technology in the suits at the world titles."

Sort of, not forgetting the all-important and oft-misunderstood notion that suits such as the LZR favour some athletes more than others. That is unfair, which is why FINA is minded to remove the LZR and other similar types of suits by 2010. From the point of view of those who felt cheated last year by the appearance of a suit that had them beat, they face reliving the nightmare again this summer, although it must be said that developments since and the remodified versions of suits banned for the time being will make it impossible to say that the LZR is any more unfair than any other suit this long-course season.

One ray of hope in the whole saga came in a message from arena. You might have thought that the Italians would have been somewhat angry that the X-Glide had been rejected. Instead, a note reads: "after all, a good day for the sport of swimming". Now that is the spirit that we are looking for from suit makers. What we don't want is any whining from those who would still be making boosters if they could get away with it. The message is clear: no more performance enhancement.

And on that note, a footnote to the blogging blockheads who believe that scribbling notes on the internet under a made-up name places them beyond a requirement to operate within truth and the law. To them, two notes:

• arena pay for advertising space on SwimNews, just as suit makers from TYR to Speedo and from Blueseventy to Finis pay for advertising in numerous swim news and club and college sites around the world. It is a model used the world over by television companies, newspapers, magazines and websites. How advertising revenue is spent is then up to each organisation. SwimNews spends a modest sum of money it receives from arena on editorial activity for the In the Arena: how rivals square up features, while the bulk of the money is committed to programming and to developing products for the future. I'm not quite sure how that might translate to Craig Lord being on arena's payroll. What I am happy to confirm is that the agreement between SwimNews and arena specifies that the suit maker has no call on editorial decisions. The suit maker has adhered to that line happily and professionally. 
• And the second note: I am not married to "an East German doper". My wife swam at junior club level and was never placed on any doping regime and was  a teenager still when the Wall fell. But best that you apologise to her, not me, for that one and perhaps to our children too, while you're at it. You might extend that apology, American college boys and masters who ought to know better at their age - people who seem to have scant regard and respect for their most-important First Amendment - to "dopers" such as Rica Reinisch and others who at 13 years of age were taken into a room by a doctor or a coach and told that they were to be given an injection that would help them to recover between training sessions that were already exceeding 80km a week. They were also told not to tell their parents or others. They were not told that the injections ranged from Oral Turinabol to testosterone preparations some of which had never been tested on animals, let alone humans. In any language and culture, that constitutes abuse. They were victims. The second tier of victims were those robbed of Olympic and other victories that should have been theirs. But best  take care when using the term doper for a 13-year-old who by 14 was training 100km a week, by 15 was a world record holder and by 16 had developed a dangerous condition in her ovaries, had to quit swimming and has lived with serious health problems ever since. In 1999, Reinisch had the courage to stand in court and testify against her abusers, along with a shoal of teammates, many of whom gave birth to deformed children and also suffered (continue to suffer in many cases) health problems related to the abuse they suffered in the 1970s and 1980s. Such victims of abuse who stood up and told the truth so that others might not suffer the same again deserve the respect of you folk out there who don't even have the courage to use your own names when standing up for what you feel is right or wrong on the simple matter of suits, regardless of where you stand on that issue.