Radio Australia Today Editorial

THAT swimsuit controversy

29 July 2009

Did it seem strange to you that all of a sudden, at the Swimming World Championships currently on in Rome, world records are falling all over the place?

Ian Thorpe’s record fell, Stephanie Rice’s world record fell. Overnight we even had a Michael Phelps world record fall.

You must’ve wondered if all the world’s elite swimmers suddenly got faster.

In truth, they did. They got faster, and it was because of the polyurethane swimsuit that they have been wearing. This is no ordinary swimsuit. It compresses the body (so much so that it takes more than half an hour to get into it), and adds a huge amount of buoyancy, which means that the swimmer doesn’t have to fight to stay on top of the water.

The result is that swimmer is faster. When the Rome Champs organisers announced that every swimmer would be wearing the same swimsuit (to avoid unfair advantage to any one competitor), we saw scores of athletes struggling into the Catwoman-style body suits. And we saw them breaking world records like, as one newspaper put it, confetti.

Then overnight came the news that the swimsuits will be banned from next year .

It’s a funny call in some ways. The call is realistic in that swimmers who have no access to such suits have been disadvantaged. People all over the world are training right now in nothing but their speedos and ordinary bathers. At least swimming will be open to everyone again. On the other side though, having allowed the suits for a short while, we are now going to change the critieria again, giving nobody any real closure, especially the swimmers who have been competing in Rome. They’ll never know if they were legitimate. The feeling will be that they never were.

But mostly the problem will be that the world records set in those suits will be very hard to beat, and when they are beaten, the athletes that do it will have to be much much stronger and better than the swimmers who set the records, because they will not have the advantage of the suits.

So where does this leave people like retired Australian swimmer Ian Thorpe, who no longer competes, and will not be able to try to regain his world record. It leaves him precisely nowhere. His record was beaten by almost the smallest possible margin, even with the help of the suit, which just goes to show how fantastic a swimmer he was. That a lesser swimmer in a catsuit beat his record is just not fair.

For a brief moment swimmers have been given a leg-up. Serious thought should be given to taking away world records won in the suits. For those swimmers who would’ve beaten the record anyway, suit or not, that would be a shame, but that’s life.

Of course this is not a life and death issue, but people in two hundred years will look back at these records, and unless some reparation is made, the people of that future generation will wrongly think that the record holders were greatest swimmers on the planet, when the truth is they probably weren’t.

– Phil