The governing body of international swimming competition FINA is instituting a ban on the high-tech swimsuits that have been used to set a flurry of new world records.
In the 17 months since the LZR Racer hit the market and spawned a host of imitators, more than 130 world records have fallen, including seven (in eight events) by Michael Phelps during the Beijing Olympics.
Phelps, a 14-time Olympic gold medalist, applauded FINA’s proposal that racing suits be made of permeable materials and that there be limits to how much of a swimmer’s body could be covered. The motion must be approved by the FINA Bureau when it convenes Tuesday.
I see two considerations at play here. First, they may intend to put asterisks on all of the recent records in order to effectively reinstate older records by swimmers who never had the advantage of the new suits. For example,
Ian Thorpe’s 2002 world best in the men’s 400 meters freestyle final was thought to be as good as sacred but Germany’s Paul Biedermann swam 3 minutes 40.07 to beat the mark by one hundredth of a second and take gold.
Its hard to argue with this motivation, but it necessitates a quick return to the old suits in order to give current swimmers a chance to set un-asterisked records while still at their peak. However the ban does not go into effect until 2010.
Don’t confuse this with the second likely motivation which is to put a halt to a technological arms race. That is also the motivation behind banning performance-enhancing drugs. The problem with an arms race is that every competitor will be required to arm in order to be competitive and then the ultimate result is the same level playing field but with the extra cost of the arms race.
On the other hand, allowing the arms race avoids having to legislate and litigate detailed regulations. If we just gave in and allowed performance-enhancers then we would have no drug tests, no doping boards, no scandals. If we ban the new swimsuits we still have to decide exactly which swimsuits are legal. And we go back to chest- and leg-hair shaving. Plastic surgery to streamline the skin?
Swimsuits don’t cause harm like drugs do. Since the costs are relatively low, there is a legitimate argument for allowing this arms race and avoiding having to navigate a new thicket of rules.
Cheap Talk 
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July 27, 2009 at 12:27 pm
Vinnie
How totally absurd. As you said, the reasonable justification with PEDs is to protect athletes from having to choose between their health and their performance. I even understand measures like regulating racket dimensions in tennis because that can change the nature of the competition (i.e. de-emphasizing shot placement and strategy, reducing the match to a game of who can get the most aces).
Superior swimsuits, I’d assume, offer roughly the same advantage to all competitors; in which case, the only ones unfairly disadvantaged by the advancements are the retired record-holders. Should we really care about them? One-to-one comparisons simply can’t be made across eras. Greatness is a matter of outshining your peers–not guys who come along decades after you.
What should we make of steady improvements in sprinting records? Are we supposed to blame the better shoes? The smoother track? Ban it all!
October 28, 2009 at 3:28 pm
Anonymous
I am a swimmer myself and I do agree with the decision to ban non-textile suits. Because they are boyant, they do more than just help a swimmer who has done all of the work and put in the time better their personal best by a few one-hundreths or maybe a tenth of a second, they can enable any swimmer to drop a few seconds. When one is at the Olympic or World Championships level, there is so little left to improve that almost all of one’s time drops are measured in tenths, and a drop of one second would cause much excitement.
Another thing is that not everybody has acess to these suits. They are very expensive and not all high level swimmers are sponsored by the componies that make the suits.
Why FINA baned full body suits, however, is beyond me. Full body suits have been around for several years and have never caused proplems.
July 27, 2009 at 12:35 pm
Vinnie
I should retract my “roughly the same advantage” assertion if this is true:
Squeezed into the corset-like suit, a muscled and stocky body is as streamlined as a long and lean one; a soft abdomen as effective as six-pack abs. “The thing that’s really hurt more than anything else is the whole suit situation has devalued athleticism,” Salo said. “A lot of kids who aren’t in very good shape can put on one of these suits and be streamlined like seals.”
I’d like to see the data to back this up. This reeks of the kind of conjectural claim that’s mostly debunked by some hard data.
July 28, 2009 at 12:21 pm
donna
Well, considering the recent performance of the suits, sometimes they don’t reduce drag…
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/27/ricky-berens-splits-swims_n_245780.html