Stripped back, swimming is one of the purest athletic competition sports. The medium is repeatable, it's water, in a pool. The pool is the same length. The lanes are the same width. Whether it's indoors or outdoors, there is very little to affect your progression through the water. It is you, in your own lane v's the clock. If you're the fastest, you win.
Nothing has changed. If you're the fastest, you still win. The difference is, we can't tell who is the fastest athlete.
The one who has done the training, passed their drug tests, got their taper right, got their mental state right, had a race plan, executed it better than everyone else on the day, passed another drug test, and been the best at combining those elements. That makes you a winning athlete.
Now, we are stuffing this combination in to tight fitting polyurethane suits, and masking some of these elements.
There are plenty of arguments:
Coaches: "These suits are a substitute for correct training. They artificially enhance endurance, core stability, technique, and this should be taught correctly, by coaches". - Well, coaches, maybe you're not as important as you think you are?
Past athletes: "All the old world records are being beaten, in our day it was all about us, not the suits". - Guys, do you really need your name at the top of a start list to reaffirm you and your EGO that you were indeed great, a legend? Times change, history does not.
Current athletes: "The suit doesn't swim for you, you still have to train, to race, to turn up prepared". Let me clean the vomit from my mouth, yes, yes, yes we know that. But, THEY ASSIST YOU! - Say it in private first, it might just make it easier to cough out in front of the camera.
The media: "Scandal this, boycott that, a win for technology, tension in the camp, ripped suits, asses on camera". - Thank you, swimming has found a new way to be in most news breaks and papers.
This is not simply about who has the best technology, they can all source their fabrics from similar suppliers. It is about who is able to access this technology, in time, to make it a legitimate, proper element of their athletic performance package. And, this is about the interpretation, and more importantly, the enforcing, of ambiguous rules.
For those manufacturers, who have been brave enough to take on the rules, construct new suits, and fight hard to have them allowed, I say well done. We have had an explosion of brands enter the sport recently, willing to invest millions of dollars on R&D and marketing, to grab a slice of the pie. Is that a bad thing?
The real problem, are those that sit at the dizzying heights of the sport's administration. The politicians. The shiny pants brigade. The rubber desk Johnny's. Swine.
FINA, you have allowed all of this to happen, via ambiguous rules and by-laws, shoddily interpreted and applied due to threats of withdrawals of funding, law suits and heavy handed tactics, to that I say, YOU ARE PISS WEAK!
If you love this sport, and not the junket it provides you, show some balls, make some hard decisions, make them with the best possible information available, make them known well in advance to allow for adaptation, then enforce them.
This may just allow the even playing field that everyone is striving for.
And no, taking the retrograde step of rolling back technology to the pre 2000 era, whilst leaving the modern day rubber records on the books, IS NOT a decision. It's a fucking embarrassment!
And, for the technophobes, step outside your ego, swimming is a pumping conversation piece, for a lot of wrong reasons, I agree. But, do we want to be pure and boring, or hi-tech and thoroughly engaging.
There's no such thing as bad publicity, right?
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