Olympic trials season gets underway in earnest on Saturday when Britain's best race after places on a home Games team over eight days of competition at the London Aquatics Centre, with international finals following the domestic battle as part of the official Olympic test event.

This time four years ago, the sport was swimming in talk of the LZR Racer, polyurethane and the crashing thud of records being broken with alarming frequency that threatened to turn the extraordinary into an everyday event. The bodysuits burst with the January 1, 2010 pricking of a balloon that buoyed performance and skewed results for 22 months.

Much water under the bridge. The next chapter on suits might better be described as water off a duck's back, your local store now able to sell you a spray that negates the element that makes swimming possible. 

No red warning light as yet but the trend raises some questions, which boil down to this one: are the new FINA suit rules and the organisation of swimming worldwide up to coping with the vapour of technology that is surely on the wish list of the world-be cheat?

Talk of spray-on water repellents has been part of the background noise in the race pool for a while now - predating, in fact, the moment poly put the kettle on four years ago this month as the first LZR world records fell. Meantime, suit makers have applied silicon, natural grain derivates and other products to their fabrics to repel water, while new testing procedures can detect and reject coatings that create a mesh-closing of material. 

However, the world never stops - and what was in the lab and available to the few yesterday is already for sale online and likely to be in the corner shop tomorrow: look along the line of household sprays and soon you may find one that you can apply to your worn-out coat, to your not-so-waterproof shoes, to your laptop bag and even your skin. 

There are others that spray on the skin and after a short time can be pulled (not peeled) off like a t-shirt, the spray forming a material to the pattern you have sprayed on. The new t-shirt can, when you tire of it, be placed back in the liquid pot from whence it came and mixed back to its original form ready for a new designed to be poured forth.

Already on sale and in use far and wide are products that use nano-particle technology that does not rely on closing the mesh of fabric to repel water. Some such products are not tested for under the current regime governed by FINA, if my reading of dense literature and the rule book and guidelines serves me right.

There are lots of fantastic applications for such technology in the world. In the world of elite competitive swimming, textile suits are not supposed to cancel out the element of the sport, the very thing that makes it swimming. 

Some while back, an expert told me that "sealing" sprays had a distinct smell to them - but it would only be a matter of time before detection would only be possible under close scrutiny of a the laboratory kind. A sprayed suit would look exactly like the non-sprayed suit to boot, he noted.

In the spirit of vigilance that was sadly missing back in 2007 and early 2007, leading coaches in the US pointed SwimNews to various places where you can find references to all of this, in mainstream media and on technology websites.

You can have a look at examples of some of the things mentioned above in the following videos here, here, here and here, that talk of the nanotechnology that will be a part of everyday life sooner than you can spray a suit on. There's a video out there of a suit being sprayed too but to send you there might be akin to directing you to the sale of clenbuterol for the price of shade and shadow.

Plunging back into the race pool, suit testing is almost exclusively reserved to the big FINA and other major international events, with many regional and domestic events run under conditions far removed from the watchful eye of Prof. Jan Anders Manson and the independent suit testing team hired by FINA.

The approach of the international federation and the Swimwear Approval Commission led by Prof Manson, has been based on a similar model to anti-doping: drawing lines, authorising suits, allowing identification of approved apparel through labelling, and then letting the show go on with hope and trust in the good nature of those chasing performance. 

That last part of the equation is where questions arise. If, for example, a spray were to be applied to an approved suit to change its nature (repel water and turn it from a suit to a bodyboard, in simplistic terms) in a way that would avoid detection by eye and nose (and possible touch), how would the sport cope? What mechanism is there to deal with such behaviour?

Officials are now pondering such questions at a time when "problem" means potential waiting to happen in a world where we know people will, in the face of fair play, take banned substances damaging to their health. Up to now, the answer has been along these lines: if someone complains we can ask for a suit to be tested after a race. 

There are a heap of problems inherent in that position, starting with:

• how does one raise a suspicion about something one cannot see or smell or feel? 

Answer: with great difficulty. 

• domestic Olympic season. How many officials at how many domestic trials coming up over the next couple of months will have the experience, knowledge, drive and indeed authority to step up to a swimmer either heading into or heading out of a final and say: "Excuse me, we have reason to believe (someone has complained) that your suit might not be what it says on the tin … could you head to the changing room with this test-suit official, like you would with the doping control agent, take your suit off and hand it in for testing before making contact with anyone else along the way, conscious as we are of chain of command issues"? 

Answer: probably none, if only because such things have simply never been part of the sport and are, therefore, open to challenge themselves.

As such, we enter a season in which it is possible (even if we believe it unlikely) to spray a suit without being detected in a system (far more so in the pool away from the biggest of meets but a pool, nonetheless, that grants you access to that biggest of meets) that is highly unlikely to lift you out of the line and call your suit to account.

Good too, at this point, to remind ourselves that there is a very high degree of pitch from marketeers and merchandisers of suits not supposed to enhance performance and products that definitely will, while it remains to be seen whether any out there have actually been busy testing the effectiveness of water-repellent sprays on textile suits for use in racing (such practices under race conditions are specifically banned under FINA rules).

Hyper-vigilance of an assertive kind is the key. In other words, it should not take a complaint for a swimmer to know that they may be called to submit their suit for testing after a race - in the same way as they expect to be called at random to pee in a bottle from time to time. 

In anti-doping, we expect swimmers to be tested out-of-competition, at random, and in-competition when setting records, winning medals and at random. The suits issue is purely one for the competitive arena but the post-race complaint is not the way to go: among other reasons it places a burden of responsibility on an innocent party who is likely to have been brought up not to "tell tales", so to speak (not to mention the singular pre-race focus of athletes who as likely to be found taking a magnifying glass to an opponent's suit just before taking to their blocks as they are supping a pint of best brew).

Pre-race random checks are perceived as intrusive, apt to distract the swimmer called out. It would be easy, however, for random selections to be made before races, with "suit-check" cards placed in clothing baskets by officials while racing is underway. The swimmer would only know that they have been chosen for suit check when they leave the deck, just as they only know after races whether they must attend doping control.

Random checks should be obligatory at all major meets and qualification tournaments - and if in some cases, because of local conditions unsuited to testing, that means that suits handed in for checking have to be sent to a lab (like a dope test) via a chain of control, so be it, if that is the only way to know whether one athlete is at a disadvantage to another purely because of a spray applied illegally and against the spirit and word of swimming law.

Important to keep a check on costs too but fees will be incurred in any measures designed to take on the cheat. Such is life. The alternative is to go the way of those who argue that doping is no worse than the advantage gained by better facilities or diet or medical care so better just to open the medical cabinet to all and let chaos be encouraged. Hand the world, in other words, to those who in a free-for-all would not stop there but surely up the ante to a dangerous level that would require another line to be drawn in the sand and thus negate the very idea of ridding the world of lines. 

There may never be a day when suit checking can detect what gains are to be had in the weave of a material close or unclosed, sealed with spray or not, when huge chaps such as James Magnussen, Cesar Cielo, Nathan Adrian and Co are travelling off a wall at top speed. But where the sport can identify a potential problem in technology already of this world, then those in charge have a responsibility to ensure that the rulebook and process designed to leave swimming to swimmers and water can cope with the challenging mindset of the cheat that we know to be alive and kicking.