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Alarm Clocks Ring In Speedoland

Jun 27, 2009  - Craig Lord

Speedo nations are waking up big time to what the Pandora's box that FINA and the suit they began to wear last year - the LZR Racer - threw open. 

Down Under's Sunday papers are full of the cry of "let's get back to basics and cut out all this nonsense". Reporter Claire Harvey in the Australian Sunday Telegraph notes that leading Australian biomechanists say that the only solution is a full return to textile suits.

Bruce Mason, head of the aquatics testing, training and research unit at the Australian Institute of Sport, is quoted as saying: "FINA have got themselves trapped. You can bet this will be the only year in which these suits are allowed. If you're going to have a go at a world record, this is the year to do it."

What his words do not point out is what European nations now wearing Jaked01s, adidas Hydrofoils, arena X-Glides and the like is this: if you allow a truly significant degree of performance-enhancement (LZR) then why not allow more; and anyhow, how do you control such things. The answer dawning on FINA is simple: you cannot control them - and when biofeedback starts to bite, as it already is according to some closely linked with people working on precisely that aspect of fabric development, swimming as we know it will be lost without trace.

Mason tells the Sunday Telegraph that he believes the only option for the sport to regain credibility is for FINA to ban the use of non-permeable materials, such as polyurethane and neoprene. Harvey notes that the LZR launch in February 2008 "divided the swimming world".

Swimming Australia, which is sponsored by Speedo, welcomed the suits and would hear no criticism at the time when world records started to tumble. The paper quotes Australian head coach Alan Thompson from 2008 as saying: "We can't be still swimming in wool. I could put it on and there's no way I would break a world record. Any speculation that the suits are doing it, takes away from the performance of athletes. World records would go down at this time [an Olympic year] anyway."

A year on, Thompson, a member of the FINA suits commission, wants an end to all suits that enhance performance, which would mean that the LZR must go. When FINA allowed 100% non-textile suits last week in the face of legal challenge from Speedo rivals, Thompson said that he was "extremely disappointed ... we have got to get rid of that situation where we talk about what swimsuits people are wearing and get back to talking about what the swimmers are doing and what the coaches are doing."

That will only happen if everything from the LZR onwards is axed. As AIS biomechanist David Pease puts in in the Aussie Sunday papers: "I think they're [FINA] going to have to crack down on it. The swimming community is pretty unified in saying it's just getting out of hand." The papers note that AIS experts say that it is "impossible to test whether a suit traps air" because of the difference in body types and race conditions and strokes and a host of other variables. All that is known is that the suits serve to aid speed, buoyancy and endurance.

Duncan Armstrong, Olympic champion in 1988, tells the Sunday Telegraph that  "even the LZR" provides significant help by keeping the swimmer's body high in the water. "A quarterinch in the water in your position translates to seconds, and that's what everyone's searching for. That's why you do thousands of hours in the pool, working on your hand pitch and your strength, to be able to sit higher in the water. Once you sit higher, you swim across the water, not through it. Once you swim across it, you're faster."

And even those, like double Olympic champion Britta Steffen and triple Olympic champion Stephanie Rice know it and are not afraid to say it. 

Asked about Steffen's "speedboat suit", Rice said it was "the end of swimming as we know it". Rice, who deliberately avoided signing up with a suitmaker in the midst of the chaos of the past several months, will now try whatever it takes to stay ahead at world championships in Rome next month.

Having already tried a variety of arenas and other suits, she will now don a Jaked01, telling Aussie papers: "I'm going to give it a go."

FINA's position on suits and its latest "rules" were "tragic" and "terrible", said one of swimming's all-time legends, Murray Rose, triple Olympic champion in 1956. He and Armstrong were mocked in Australia last year when they warned of the Pandora's Box that had been opened. They are mocked no more in Speedo land.

Armstrong was pessimistic about FINA's chances of a return to sense if it did not take decisive and cutting action: "Pandora's box is open and they'll never get it shut again," he tells the Aussie media. "FINA is going to let another world championships be swum and run by swimmers who are just going to decimate world records. We should just play X-Files music when the swimmers come out on the blocks. It's a very serious matter. I feel for the world-record holders who have toiled away their whole careers. Their world records have been obliterated by B-grade swimmers."

Rose said FINA's decisions had meant "the extinction of swimming as we know it" and urged action by federations and coaches. "If all the national coaches come out in opposition, at some point FINA has to wake up."