Going retro: Swimming not all wet when it comes to protecting sport from high-tech body suits

Swimming takes a stand against technology

The news out of Rome was startling, at least to swimming fans and those who salivate at the thought of seeing Michael Phelps in a Speedo brief again.

Records be damned, swimming is going retro.

Out with those sleek body suits. In with something, shall we say, a bit more comfortable?

If your thing is watching swimmers go faster than ever, tune in Sunday when the world championships begin in Rome. It’s probably going to be the last chance anyone has of setting a world record in the water for a long, long time.

That’s almost heresy in a sport where records are, indeed, made to be broken. Phelps smashed seven of them himself as he swam his way to eight gold medals in Beijing last year, and that was just part of more than 100 world records that fell in 2008.

Another 30 or so were broken this year, and even more are expected to be erased at the world championships. No use to print new record books because by the time they come out they’re already out of date.

But now swimming officials are taking a stand. They’re rolling back the clock beginning next year, stripping swimmers of the high-tech body suits that made them go so fast through water you swear little propellers had to be hidden inside.

It’s a bold move by swimming’s governing body, FINA, and it goes against the seemingly relentless quest for technological advancement in sports everywhere. It also carries a risk that it will alienate fans who are interested in swimming only when there’s a world record at stake.

Bottom line, though, is that it’s the right thing to do because the new suits introduced last year were making a mockery of the sport. World records were dropping so fast they were in danger of becoming as meaningless as Barry Bonds’ home run marks

Unlike baseball, though, swimming didn’t pretend it had no performance issues. Unlike baseball, it reacted before the numbers became too much of a joke.

And maybe it’s time for some other sports to, uh, follow suit.

Not baseball, necessarily, because its problems were mostly chemically induced. Football, too, because the ball and the field remain the same even while everyone naturally wonders how 300-pounders manage to run and react so fast.

Basketball? Well, that experiment with the 11-foot rim a few years back didn’t exactly raise the game, and neither did the NBA’s ill-fated synthetic ball.

But technology has changed some sports dramatically. If swimming officials needed any examples, all they had to do was look at tennis and golf, both of which did nothing while better equipment altered the very fundamentals of the game.

This year’s Wimbledon final between Roger Federer and Andy Roddick was billed as an epic affair that went long into overtime before Federer finally prevailed. But the only reason it lasted so long was the evolution of racket technology to a point where serves are so fast they rarely can be returned.

As an exhibition of serving, it was fine. But the greatest player of his time couldn’t break serve until the 77th and final game, a good example of how much tennis has become dominated by the serve, at least in the upper levels of the men’s game.

Golf has even more problems. The entry of Tiger Woods coincided with technological advances in both clubs and balls that has turned the sport into a playground for big bombers who no longer have to worry much about hitting it into the rough.

Golf equipment has been evolving since the day of hickory shafts and gutta percha balls, but huge-headed drivers and balls that refuse to do anything but go straight have taken much of the shotmaking out of the game. That’s one reason why, on a course that requires some creativity, Tom Watson nearly won the British Open at age 59.

The PGA Tour will put restrictions on iron grooves beginning next year in an attempt to bring more chance into the equation, but it’s too little and too late. Golf officials let manufacturers run amuck for too many years to be able now to return the game to anything resembling what it once was.

Swimming officials, on the other hand, acted relatively fast. They will lose only two years worth of records to the suits that made even mediocre swimmers record busters.

There will be some complaints from swimmers, of course. No one wants to go slower than before.

But what they did should eventually suit everyone just fine.

Tim Dahlberg is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at tdahlberg(at)ap.org