Not All About the Suits Anymore

On Thursday in Shanghai at the World Swimming Championships, Ryan Lochte beat Michael Phelps in the final of the 200 meter individual medley.  It was the second time Lochte beat Phelps at the World Championships, establishing him as a real threat for London next summer.  But the fact that he beat Phelps is only part of the story.  Lochte broke the world record in the race.  Why is that significant?  Because it was the first world record broken in Shanghai.  In fact, it was the first swimming world record in over two years!

At the 2009 World Championships in Rome, a ridiculous 43 world records were broken.  In 40 events!  Ordinarily that would make for a very exciting meet.  Only it didn't.  Part of what makes a world record so special is the fact that it's supposed to be hard to do.  In Rome, frankly, it got boring.  World records were only lasting from one heat to the next, and random swimmers who were no threat for the gold were the ones breaking them.  The meet wasn't at all entertaining.

Of course, there was a reason for all the world records falling at such an alarming rate: the suits.  For years, competitive swimsuits were fairly standard.  The men wore Speedos and the women wore the standard one-piece bathing suit.  In the early 2000s, the suits gradually became longer and as times went down, more and more swimmers went to the longer suits.  By the Beijing Olympics, the old style suits were obsolete.  The full-length Speedo LZR, which Phelps wore in each of his record-setting eight gold medal swims, was the suit du jour.  Not wanting to let Speedo completely monopolize the market, all of the other swimsuit compaines started to develop their own version of the high-tech racing suits.

These suits were in widespread use by the start of the 2009 season.  And that's when all the records started falling.  First, a little bit of an explanation about what made these suits so fast.  Essentially, they were made of rubber.  Rubber is buoyant.  So, a swimmer clad head-to-toe in a material that water effectively bounces right off is naturally going to move through water faster than a swimmer wearing something that will absorb some of it.  As a result, an assault on the world records begins.  And the swimmers breaking them are random swimmers from random countries who have no business even being in the discussion.  Meanwhile, the best swimmers in the world are being left in the dust.  Sometimes those records lasted a matter of minutes until somebody in the next heat broke it.  Watching world-record swims was no longer entertaining.

I like a world record as much as the next guy, but it was getting ridiculous, and not in a good way.  Fortunately, FINA, swimming's international governing body, agreed.  They banned the high-tech suits starting on January 1, 2010.  And those suits have to be made out of an actual textile material.  In addition, they established rules saying how long the suits can be.  No more full-length suits.  Men's suits can only go from the waist to the knees, while women's suits can only go from the shoulder to the knees.  Other factors came into play as to why the suits were banned (such as the fact that they were extremely expensive, they took forever to put on, and you could only wear them a few times), but it was essentially because of the world records.  (Phelps saying after the Rome World Championships that he wouldn't swim competitively again until the suits were banned probably came into play, as well.)

Anyway, in swimming circles, 2009 has been labled the "Suit Era" much like the '90s and early 2000s are known as the "Steroid Era" to a lot of baseball fans.  In the year and a half since the suits were banned, the intended result is indeed what's happened.  Swimmers are winning races because they're better than their competitors.  The racing has improved.  But unfortunately, the times weren't going down.  No world records  were broken.  Some people thought they couldn't be.  The high-tech suits had that much of an effect on the sport.

Thanks to Ryan Lochte, that all changed on Thursday.  Once again, we have a world record that shouldn't have an asterisk attached to it.  And now that people have seen it can be done, I'm sure others will follow.  With that awesome aquatic center that was recently completed and just opened, there's bound to be records that fall at the London Olympics.  But not all of the records.  The "Suit Era" is over.  World records are no longer diluted.

Personally, I think swimming should go all the way back.  Make them go back to wearing regular bathing suits and Speedos like all competitive swimmers did before the turn of the century.  That's what they wear in training, so why not have it be the same in the actual meet?  Ian Thorpe started this whole mess when he wore a full bodysuit in Sydney.  Fortunately, that's over now.  It's no longer about the suits.  It's about the swimmers.  Like it should be.