What's wrong with the supersuits

With the calendar rolling over to 2010, the new FINA suit regulations are officially in place (although here in the states, they’ve been in place since the beginning of the fall season for most organizations). But that doesn’t mean that the debate over whether or not they SHOULD be allowed will subside.

Here’s my take on it. I don’t have a problem with records being broken. Records are made to be broken. Time standards can be adjusted. Look at all of the other training and race technology, and how that has changed swimming from even 10 years ago. Just because the suits aren’t going to be juiced up, doesn’t mean that swimming won’t continue to get faster. Sure, the pace at which records will be broken is going to slow down, but it will still happen. And that shouldn’t be a problem. The slew of records has tuned an entirely new audience on to the sport of swimming. When was the last time that the World Championships got as much coverage as they did in 2009? Never, and it was entirely due to the records.

And at the end of the day, while records are nice, swimmers are competing against the current field of swimmers. A World Champion in the 100m fly is still the best 100m butterflier in the world regardless of whether she set the World Record. And with the competitive balance that is popping up with swimming throughout the world (Australia and the United States used to dominate the swimming world, but now there are a number of top swimmers from other countries), there won’t be many swimmers who have nothing to chase but records anymore. There will always be a new swimmer pushing to be the best.

HOWEVER, I still think it was the right thing to ban the suits. The problem with the suits is limited access.

The polyurethane suits that the world’s best have been using to shatter records are incredibly expensive. They cost upwards of 700$ each, and are only good for a few races. Furthermore, they are made so tightly, that they commonly tear, requiring purchase of another suit.

If you’re Michael Phelps, and you are being paid to swim and win races, this is not a big deal. But for the rest of us, this financial outlay is just unimaginably huge.

Some people have argued that you then limit the suits to the top levels of swimming. But how do you decide what level of meets are important enough to warrant the suits? Sectional Championships? National Championships? The Olympics? And then what would result is a huge gap between those who have qualified for those meets and those who have not, and it would be a gap that would be near impossible to jump once you are on the outside. Especially when there are time standards involved, if for some reason a swimmer is not able to compete the weekend of a Sectionals meet or National Championship where the suits are allowed, then how can USA-Swimming possibly expect to set equitable Olympic Trials time standards, when different swimmers are competing with different suits?

USA-Swimming’s quick fix was to disallow the suits for swimmers aged 12&under, with the presumption that any swimmer over that age was committed enough to spend the money on the suits if they truly wanted to be the best. The problem with this theory is that once you get to a certain level, swimming is no longer separated by age. For example, Dana Vollmer qualified for the Olympic Trials at age 12. Should she have been punished simply because of her age, even though she was one of the best swimmers in the country of ANY age? I certainly don’t think so.

And at what age is the appropriate cut-off, and does that really solve the problem? At age 16, I still couldn’t afford one of those suits, but there are plenty of 16 year old's that compete for, and even win, spots on Olympic rosters.

I think that this issue of access to and fairness of the suits between the haves and the don’t-haves is the real problem. Of course, the powers that be who are in charge of FINA now probably just don’t like that all of their times, that used to be World Class, would now make them just average age-group swimmers due to the new suits.

Many of the world’s top swimmers, including THE top swimmer Michael Phelps, that have been given a chance have expressed their disapproval of the suit. If they don’t like them, then there’s got to be a good reason to not have them.