This afternoon's finals sessions at the World Cup will mark the last meet at which USA coach Bob Bowman, mentor to Michael Phelps, will see shiny suits in the race pool. How did he feel? "Thrilled," beamed the mastermind behind the most successful Olympian in history. 

He will not attend the duel in the pool when the USA takes on a European select in England next month so Berlin would be his last brush with the bodysuits before the January 1 ban. "With that, it will be gone," he added, sweeping his hand before him. Not gone in one significant way. 

Bowman would not be adjusting his training much at all to account for the loss of the shiny suits, given that his squad trained in traditional textile suits anyway,  but, he told SwimNews with a glint in his eye: "I will be changing one thing: I will be using the (shiny) suits in training ... to give them the neuro-muscular feel for racing fast early in the season."

Bill Sweetenham, the Aussie guru in Berlin as part of his role advising Spain on its national programme , was on hand to say: "The suits are the best training aid ever invented. They aid recovery, they aid flotation, help you swim higher in the water at speed and at lower speeds. You can do more repeats at race speed, and beyond race speed (without the swimmer breaking down). You can't just do 30m at race speed but 50m and more. Far better than towing ropes and stretch chords. When kids are fatigued you can get the in a suit and aid their recovery."

As a coach he never wanted to see the suits back in the race pool. Beyond their usefulness as training aids, they might also serve well as teaching tools when it came to easing swimmers back to the suits that will wear in racing from New Year's Day. He said that he would "have three suits available: one full one, one with no full legs and one with no arms ... as tools to introduce swimmers back to the sport of swimming." Some coaches in the US, Australia and Britain were already working along those lines.

There might even be a rush on shiny sales as suit makers seek to clear some stock by marketing their forbidden race goods as training aids. But the price tag might have to fall and the durability of some of the soon-to-be banned apparel improved, the bills and rips of the past two years would suggest.

Bowman is among those who see use in the products that he is delighted to see dropped from the race regime. The shiny suits had taught the sport lessons, he said. "We've had tremendous advantaged from the LZR but it got to a point where work and feeling in water didn't matter anymore. That's not what the sport should be about."

He was looking forward to the race days of the future. "It'll be so much better. We won't have the stress of the time it takes to put them on, the worry of whether you've got the right one and 'what if it rips?'." Bowman had done a quality set with his squad recently in which part of the drill was to get the suit on. "Some of them took an hour to get it on. It was terrible. It disrupts everything you do. For swimmers it''l be a case of being more conscious of how your your body feels."

Bowman was please with the way that Phelps had conducted himself on world cup tour and described as "his best performance" as the 200m medley heats this morning, in which a 1:55.92 effort left the Olympic champion in lane four for the final for the first time in the two meets this week. Phelps was working hard and was learning valuable things. Such as the importance of expectation. What's missing off the wall (in 2010 textile suit), said Bowman, is thae extra flow and glide that makes the breakout into stroke all the longer and smoother. Swimmers would find, like Phelps had, that the point at which they had come to expect the glide phase off the wall to break into a stroke fell a fair bit sooner. That required adjustment to avoid there being a dead zone in propulsion.

Phelps will compete in two more meets this year: a local event in the US and then the Duel in manchester next month. The big targets for 2010 were the US summer nationals and trials, the Pan Pacific Championships and then, a year from now, the world short-course championships in Dubai.