Lines are being drawn by swimmers in the suit wars that will not go away until the sport has decided that it wishes once more to be technique- (not equipment-) based.

In a great spread in L'Equipe today, the French sports paper notes the division that exists between swimmers: of the 21 swimmers sampled, 13 want a return to textile bathers and briefs; of the 14 swimmers featured with a picture and a quote, four don't mind use of bodysuits but want a halt placed on "technology" (which simply means fabrics that have been around a long time but never before allowed in race suits); and only three say "let the suit reign".

Here's the count among those pictured and quoted: 

• In the camp that want to see a return to briefs for men and textile suits for all: Alain Bernard (FRA); Filippo Magnini (ITA); Stefan Nystrand (SWE); Mirna Jukic (AUT); Therese Alshammar (SWE); Paul Biedermann (GER); Hugues Duboscq (FRA).
• In the camp that is happy to keep bodysuits and other cuts but wants no use of fabrics that enhance performance: Alex Dale Oen (NOR)
• In the camp with Dale Oen  but unsure where to draw the line, unsure whether the "reference point" ought to be before the LZR racer or at the LZR Racer, but nothing beyond that: Eamon Sullivan (AUS)
• In the camp of those who want to draw a line but think that the 50% textile, 50% performance-enhancing fabrics is fine: Libby Trickett (AUS); Federica Pellegrini (ITA)
• In the camp that says let loose the suits of war: Fred Bousquet (FRA); Rafa Munoz (ESP); Markus Rogan (AUT).

In mails received by SwimNews, more than 50 other medal winners at Olympic and world levels have let it be known that they wish to see a return to textile suits and an end to the use of non-permeable, non-textile fabrics. They include Cameron  Van Der Burgh, of South Africa, who set world short-course records in a suit that was subsequently rejected by FINA after independent tests. Many swimmers and coaches have asked for their names not to be revealed at his time of uncertainty, and SwimNews respects their right to withhold their identity from the public domain, while making clear to us who they are and what they stand for.

What they said: 

Bernard: Returning to briefs would be delicate, but if the whole world goes there, why not? It would be funny and there would be some surprises ... but be careful, it would need the rules to be precise about the cut of the suit and nature of the material!"

Magnini, showing gladiatorial spirit: "I dream of a moment when FINA decides to return to briefs like the ones everyone wears on the beach. If we as swimmers decide that that is what we want to wear in Rome who can stop us". 

Nystrand: "Briefs for everyone! That way, we all compete on a level field and it gets back to being about the swimmers and training once more."

Jukic: I know that swimmers want to swim fast, but no-one would find it acceptable to wear a suit that helps you swim 50m in 10secs. One day, they'll propose that we wear motors on our buttocks to go faster."

Biedermann: "This has made swimming less attractive. FINA should intervene and get rid of polyurethane for good. It's detrimental to swimming. Swimming is not F1. The swimmers should be the chief protagonist of performance, following strict and clear rules."

Bousquet: "Go and ask Usain Bolt if he is in favour of a return to a cinder track". [That somewhat misses the point: no-one is asking for Fred to race in the Seine as they did back at the first Paris Games or in a choppy lane-less tank as they did at the second Paris Games; the more relevant question is, go and ask Usain Bolt how he feels about adding springs and wheels to  his shoes but make sure you tell him that his rival might have more effective springs and wheels.

And here is what Dale Oen and Van Der Burgh have had to say.

Whichever side of the debate swimmers are on, they can be regarded in the same sympathetic light: they ought never to have been placed in the situation of having to argue against or defend the use of  a suit in the first place.

L'Equipe carries an image of each swimmer and a quote alongside that. Two of those who have most benefitted from the Jaked01, the maker of which is preparing a challenge to FINA in the Court of Arbitration for Sport, want to keep the tool of their success on their skins (the exception is Markus Rogan, who argues, illogically, that the suits will bring more money into the sport); Australians remain loyal to Speedo, though Sullivan notes that the LZR was responsible for the wave of world records in 2008 and says "logically, we should go back"; while the list of swimmers who are happy to see textile-only, even briefs-only suits include at least five swimmers who could claim to have been disadvantaged by what has come to pass in the past 12 months, in part because their natural morphology and body position in water - natural or honed through training - already made them special.

L'Equipe considers the costs to suit makers and the costs to the sport if suit wars are allowed to continue. So far there is a gulf between the euros 6 million invested by Speedo in the LZR and the 600,000 or so invested by Jaked in its suits (most of which remain in the water). Arena is said to have invested 1 million in its latest range (that not counting the investment it makes in swimmers, such as Bernard, who receives euros 700,000 over four years, according to L'Equipe), while Tyr is quoted as saying that "several millions of investment" have led to a "return of only 1.5 million." 

All of which highlights one thing, says L'Equipe: the massive gulf between the big development costs involved in trying to find the next fast suit and the budgets needed for the relatively few "big stars" and the pitiful level of support for development of swimming at source, down at club level. In France, the average programme gets something like euros 5,000 a year in apparel support.

In the past two months SwimNews has received e-mails from coaches and organisers of more than 30 programmes that want an end to the suits crisis, which is crippling them.

Here is an example from the US as outlined by Mark Warkentin, the USA Olympic 10km swimmer who has turned coach. 

"Here's the reason this issue is so important to me post-Olympics," he says. "Recently I became a swim coach at a brand new swim club in Santa Barbara, Ca.  and my primary group of swimmers will be younger than college aged.  Prior to the new suits, swimmers in high school had fighters chance when competing with older swimmer, but right now high school aged swimmers are at a terrible disadvantage in two primary aspects:

 1. the suits help older swimmers SIGNIFICANTLY while only helping younger swimmers moderately.

 2. club programs do not have funding to throw thousands of dollars at swimsuits (whereas college and postgraduate athletes are more able to get suits free or at a reduced price) so we must ask the parents of swimmers to pony up the money.  Some parents can pay it, others cannot (which is a problem itself) but even those parents that CAN pay for a $500 suit are not terribly happy about it.  Our sport is losing young swimmers because parents are scared they're going to be paying an extra $1,000 a year just for a swimsuit.  Young talent is going into sports that don't have the same costs. 

 I don't know what is happening to swimming at the 16 and younger age in other countries, but the suit is killing us in Southern California.  16 year old kids think they CANNOT swim fast unless they are wearing a hi-tech suit, so parents are forced to make a decision.  Everyone gets screwed - all in the name of a new record."

Warkentin is among those who would like to see a cut back in the cut, the profile of suits, and believes that the "knee to navel only coverage" as suggested to FINA by coaching and athlete representatives would be a step in the right direction. "I would love to see this as well because I think the first big step we took in the wrong direction was in 2000 when people started to seriously experiment with over the shoulder suits." He asks [if that profile cut were to be made]: "How many older swimmers would retire immediately? Many swimmers can hang around the sport because the suits keep their body stabilized and in place. They are still strong, but they are not as chiseled as when they were younger. If you took away the suit you take away a huge part of their race. No more suit equals no more artifical core stabalization. And because post graduate swimmers are often times not inclined to do a significant amount of core strength work you'd have a lot of athletes retire."

"In my estimation the landscape of the swimming world would shift tremendously if we had a "knee to navel" only rule. The sport would get younger again and the determined athletes, willing to train hard, would be the most successful."

His views are shared by numbers that would make some suit makers feel very uncomfortable indeed. For what is a suit maker without customers. In the past year, support for a return to textile and a cut back from the bodysuit profile has become widespread. A trawl through the mailbox tells me that swimmers accounting for more than 500 medals at world and Olympic levels, the bulk of those from the 1996 period onwards, would wish to see the back of "fast" suits. Among coaches of the leading 30 swimming nations in the world (going from medals tables at the biggest of events over the past decade), the vast majority now want to see  a line drawn at 2007. 

And yet, some suit makers continue to hope for more of the nonsense that goes under the false name of technology. Technology conveys a sense of novelty and progress. There is nothing new about the fabrics now being used in swim suits, the novelty being race-pool application after FINA allowed the enemy to get past the watchman; there is no "progress", beyond the undesirable and dubious gains on the clock, to be had in a war that is crippling the sport and making the suit maker king, the swimmer (beyond only a handful) beholden and more of a pauper than they ever were. 

L'Equipe carries pitiful quotes from suit makers sobbing about the loss of investment money. That is an issue between them and FINA, the international federation that made the mistake in the first place and then made its life more difficult by placing faith in suit makers to work with FINA to return swimming to being a technique-based sport. But what is clear is that some suit makers lust yet to live in a house of FINA built by them, controlled by them and suits that control performance and dictate the result sheet in a truly significant way. Legion are the infantile references to "but it is still the swimmer who has to swim, not the suits". Yes, and I can race inside 50sec over 100m freestyle wearing fins (flippers), and yes, it would be me swimming, and yes, the fins are what helped me to go that fast and no, I would be nowhere close to that speed without the fins on. 

Some suit makers have shown no regard for whether what they are doing - and where they want swimming to go - is wanted by swimmers. The SwimNews sample tallies with L'Equipe's: far more do not want what is happening than do want what is happening at the very elite end of the sport. 

Nor is there a recognition from the likes of Markus Rogan and those who share his views that swimming does not need fast suits to attract huge amounts of revenue: in the four years 2004 to 2008 FINA attracted more than $100 million in funding, the bulk of that BEFORE the LZR or any of the current generation of suits was even known about. The figures for 2000-2004 were almost as impressive, leading to the 2005 world championships at which more than $7 million was handed out in prize money to athletes in all five FINA disciplines. 

In the suit wars, swimming has watched Nike walk away and watched adidas ease back on its interest in the sport while it monitors developments in a market loaded with negative overtones for a big player that can well do without that kind of publicity. How does "great opportunity for massive revenue" in swimming tally with what has actually happened in the sport? The lead player in the suit wars in terms of impact in the pool this year is a company that came into being in 2007, developed its suits in 2008 and invested a drop in the ocean compared to the investment figures that Speedo, arena, adidas and others can boast (over many, many years), and all at a time when the likes of Nike and adidas have distanced themselves and their truly vast budgets from the sport of swimming. If it is money that swimming wants, go and do a deal with Nike and adidas and let them share the spoils. On the other hand, perhaps not.

L'Equipe's coverage takes a brief trawl of the 2000-2009 period and looks at what led to the current suits crisis, noting that Sydney 2000 marked the start of widespread use of the bodysuit (1998 was the first article I wrote on the theme, the cuttings database shows, when Paul Palmer and Sue Rolph showed up at a meet in what would develop into the adidas suit made famous by Ian Thorpe, with full arms and legs). The French paper notes that Thorpe won his record six gold medals at world titles in Fukuoka in 2001 wearing a suit that was not available to all.

The crisis set in, however, with the launch of the LZR in February 2008. That suit sparked suit wars of the kind accurately predicted by arena at the world short-course championships in Manchester, April 2008. 

And now we have a potential challenge at the Court of Arbitration for Sport. There is precedent in FINA's favour. When it allowed use of the bodysuit and was challenged in CAS in the build-up to the Sydney Games in 2000, FINA won hands down. Why? Because it is up to FINA to set the rules of the sports it governs, and only FINA has the right to say what is in and what is not. That same ruling applies today, and while FINA has a hard summer ahead, whatever it comes up with for 2010 and beyond will be the template that governs the way suit makers will have to cut their cloth.

And the greater the fuss and challenge now, the more likely FINA is to bring an axe down on the thing that has passed for "technology" and return the sport of swimming to a place where apparel does not hinder the swimmer from achieving full potential, makes swimmers feel the part, makes them and the sport look terrific and preserves modesty. Beyond that, many believe, the suit should not go.

FINA will release its final list of 2009 approved suits on Monday, June 22, and has asked federations around the world to vote, by July 3, "yes" or "no" to a return to textile suits in 2010. The ultimate vote and responsibility under the FINA Constitution, however, rests with the FINA Executive of three men and the 22-person ruling Bureau.