Techno swimsuit outrage just doesn't hold water

Aug. 4, 2009
By Gregg Doyel CBSSports.com National Columnist Tell Gregg your opinion!


The polyurethane swimsuits that have helped swimmers break more than 170 world records since 2008, including 43 last week at the World Championships in Rome, are about to go the way of the dodo bird -- had the dodo bird died off because it was too fit to survive.
This is evolution in reverse, this uprising against the polyurethane swimsuit, and someone's going to have to explain it to me -- because I don't understand. I don't understand why a swimsuit that is made by multiple companies, and is available, ostensibly, to every world-class swimmer, should be ruled illegal.


So someone help me. And by "help me," I mean read me first. Read me with an open mind, and after you've considered my argument, tell me yours. Tell me what I'm missing.
Because I don't understand this. At all.

Swimming isn't baseball, where advancements in aluminum bats have led Nike to charge $400 for a single bat, the Aero Fuse CX2, with 42 layers of carbon composite fibers that crisscross into "two independent walls engineered to allow greater compression, store more energy from the collision and release explosive power at launch." This is a bat that could kill somebody. If a college hitter smashes a ball up the middle with one of these juiced-up bats, pray it misses the pitcher's skull.
A swimsuit isn't going to kill anybody.

Swimming isn't golf, a sport whose club shafts were once made from hickory but now are made from titanium, a material so strong that Boeing uses it to hold together its biggest jets. A high-end Titleist titanium driver goes for $450, and the pros who have mastered such clubs have made all but the biggest golf courses obsolete. Courses that were good enough for Bobby Jones and Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus, courses like Augusta National, have had to move tees 50 or 60 yards back to accommodate players named Bubba Watson and Tag Ridings.
A swimsuit isn't going to make a pool obsolete.

All these swimsuits do is help the swimmers go faster. Isn't that what we want? To watch swimmers go faster? If the day comes when a shoe company revolutionizes what we thought we knew about a track spike, is that shoe going to be outlawed because the runners are running too fast?
Of course not.

What I see here are socialism and the status quo, two applications that are useful in some places but have no business being in athletics.
Socialism is at work because FINA, the swimming governing body, has bowed to the sponsors who control swimming. Not contribute to swimming. Control it. Some of the equipment companies that make the biggest contributions to swimmers in particular and the sport at large, like Speedo, have had their trunks pulled down by lesser-known companies like Arena and Jaked. The irony is beautiful in that Speedo started this revolution, introducing the LZR that dominated at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, but now Speedo has been passed like its swimmers are wearing concrete flippers. And Speedo doesn't like it. Breaks my heart.

But if Speedo doesn't like it, and Nike also doesn't like it ... well then, FINA doesn't like it. Because swimmers bound to Speedo or Nike were caught in Rome using the Jaked 01 or the Arena X-Glide, trying unsuccessfully to fool people by marking out the competing brand names with magic marker.
That's bad for business for Speedo and Nike, and if it's bad for Speedo and Nike, it's bad for FINA. So this entire style of swimsuit will be illegal by 2010 -- because the scientists at Speedo and Nike can't keep up.
The status quo also is being protected. Before Arena and Jaked got good at this, Speedo swimmers dominated the pool. And by Speedo swimmers, I mean Michael Phelps. You saw what he did in Beijing. When he wasn't hitting the bong, he was hitting the wall ahead of everyone else. And that's the way FINA liked it. FINA liked knowing who was good, and who wasn't, and there was comfort in that.

But with these new suits, suddenly Michael Phelps -- and the U.S. swim team, come to think of it -- weren't as good as everyone thought. And if Phelps and the United States aren't dominant, well, FINA can't have that. The U.S. swim teams won a combined 22 medals in Rome, good for most countries but not good for the United States, which hadn't won so few medals since 1994.
U.S. Swimming national team director Mark Schubert dismissed the World Championships with a sneer, saying, "This will be remembered as the plastic meet." He took solace in the socialist ban of polyurethane and the return of the status quo: "I just think it's going to level the playing field a lot more. We're going to be able to tell who the real swimmers are."
You can almost see Schubert's lower lip quiver. The United States might not have swum as well as usual in Rome, but we pouted our asses off. Bob Bowman, Phelps' coach, threatened to withdraw his swimmer from future international events if the swimsuit controversy wasn't addressed, which is hilarious given -- again -- that Phelps' revolutionary (at the time) LZR swimsuit in Beijing helped him win eight medals and set seven world records.
Phelps also pouted: "It's going to be fun next year," he said, "when swimming is back to swimming."

Of course the American media is lapping it up. Phelps is still exceptional, but he was beaten last week in one of his signature events, the 200 freestyle, by a German swimmer in an Arena X-Glide. So if you read much about swimsuits, and what you read has been written by an American journalist, all you know is the dark side. This is an abomination!

Please. This is competition. If a swimmer's sponsor can't keep up, switch sponsors. This isn't a swim team at the YMCA asking parents to cough up $800 for one of the fast suits. This is world-class competition. These swimmers can afford it, and if they can't, tough.
It's made of polyurethane -- not an outboard motor. This swimsuit isn't illegal. Steroids are illegal. Coating your body with water-resistant goo is illegal. A swimsuit? Illegal?

Makes no sense to me.

Does it make sense to you?