From Montpellier, fantastic coverage in L’Equipe, as we’ve come to expect, of the French nationals, complete with a comment by Benoit Lallement  in which it is revealed the two sprinters at the helm of a French army of speedsters, Olympic gold and silver medallists Alain Bernard and Amaury Leveaux, may today wear suits in racing that have not been approved by FINA.

It is what you might expect of swimmers and coaches forced to live in times of anarchy. Those swimmers and their entourages and suit sponsors look around a poisoned pool and see suits (Jaked in particular in this case) that they suspect of pouring even further imbalance into a race pool that has been, correctly, labelled as “unfair” by many of the world’s leading coaches and swimmers past and current.

In the absence of suit police, in the absence of anyone who will say officially “this is absolutely unacceptable”, the damage to the sport of swimming continues apace. Arms have been removed from suits - a drop in the ocean - and multi-suit wearing is banned - not before time - but those things scratch at the surface of a deep-seated crisis, one that comes down to a battle of two sports: equipment-based, tech (flotation etc) led, or not. Compromise will hand the sport to one of those options - and the sport that will become extinct will be the one we knew before 2008.

The good work of reporting all of this nonsense is not confined to the pool deck. The boys and girls back in the L’Equipe office in Paris were having fun too:

The two-page spread on the French nationals unfolds alongside photos of a bodysuited brigade and under a banner headline: Quelle Pantalonnade! In the Brit parlance of street and comic stage, that means “What a load of old Pants!”, for Americans, a slapstick comedy, for international English users a knockabout farce. Indeed, a French farce in this case, but not one of France's making.

The headline is even more clever than it seems at the surface, for it sums up precisely the atmosphere on decks not just in France but around the world, where alongside swimmers and coaches in warm-up is a small army of suit pushers, merchandisers and others plying their wares as if in a market place.

Pantalonnade stems from the Italian (org. Latin) Pantalone, “a stock character that is classified as one of the vecchi (old men) in Commedia dell'arte. He is a miserly and often libidinous character”.

Perfect: as in avaricious, desirous of wealth or gain, greedy; as in having or marked by lustful desires.”

Sums up the mood of those who think that swimming “needs” suit makers who would lead the sport to hell in a handcart, who think that money is king in partnership, who do not look beyond the advantage of the moment and therefore fail to see that today’s advantage is tomorrow’s disadvantage, requiring you to find a new advantage (and fast), and eventually, the advantage that you must have is one that tips you into an unethical abyss. 

Here is a small tale in the European media, including L'Equipe: Jaked reps invited themselves in the VIP seats in Montpellier in order to watch five French records fall in their 400 euros a shot, 100% polyurethane bonded seams garments before being thrown out. Yves Jarrousse, organiser of the French nationals, denounced the "suits traffic", adding "they were not invited. They have no right to be here." Understandable that Johnny-come-lately Jaked would wish to be seen as part of the furniture of the swimming world, even when they are not invited. Only one reason why they were there in the Montpellier hot seats, of course: money. They sold 300 suits at Dutch nationals and 500 at Spanish nationals, according to reports in the European media. That's about 320,000 euros in a couple of weeks. No wonder they want the fast-suit era to march on to the death. FINA, a non-profit organisation, ought, of course, to be thinking something quite apart.

In that L’Equipe comment piece, Christos Paparrodopoulos, the coach of Hugues Duboscq, Olympic medallist and fourth in the 50m breaststroke final yesterday in a race that saw two swimmers ahead of him wipe over a second off their best times down one length, says that he does not recognise the sport about him.

Denis Auguin, coach to Bernard, who switched from Speedo to Arena at the turn of the year but knows that whatever his charge wears it must (through force of a form of blackmail that has little to do with suit makers that do not call the shots when it comes to laying down rules and everything to do with the absence of good governance) be something that makes him competitive not only with other swimmers but other suits.

“I am ready to throw in the towel,” Auguin tells L’Equipe. This is a coach who has painstakingly prepared his athlete, has seen his athlete have to don a suit last year that was necessary for him to do what he did and now must take more strides down that same road knowing that the further they go down that road, the more their good work as coach and athlete is diminished. What a sad state of affairs, what a dreadful, woeful mess the sport is in. 

The French federation, recognising that the anarchy handed down from high is something that they cannot control (Jaked is approved but clearly it should never have been approved) are taking a laissez-faire approach, L’Equipe tells us. In other words, if Bernard in a new arena designed to keep pace with the rest of the fast suits against the wishes of a company that never wanted suit wars in the first place and told FINA so very clearly, and Leveaux in a new TYR, a company that has kept up at least with the LZR from the very start of all this, turn up today wearing something officials don’t recognise as being any different to everything else around them as the big guns face five other Frenchmen who have swum 100m inside 49sec, officialdom will simply turn a blind eye. 

The swimmers may, of course, wear what has been approved. Approved and not approved may look almost precisely the same at the surface.

Under the headline "Ridicule", and in the words of Lallement: “It’s sad. Worse, it’s ridiculous.” It is the death of swimming as we have known it.