Swimming’s record farce, by the numbers
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Do you want to know just how much of a joke the space-age competition suits have made world records in swimming?
Do you want to know why the Italian swim coach who called the suits ‘technological doping’’ was right?
Go to a study published Tuesday on sportsscientists.com. It is titled ‘Swimming’s credibility crisis: How FINA’s blind eye is affecting the purity of the sport.’’
FINA, the international swimming federation, has been accused of selling out (quite literally) to the swimsuit manufacturers -- that means, accepting money to approve the suits that have rendered world records meaningless.
Here are some key points and stats from the study:
-- In 32 Olympic swimming events, 21 had world records set a total of 25 times at the Beijing Games. -- During 2008, there were 70 world records set (in 27 of the 32 events on the Olympic program.) (Although the study does not make a comparison, I did: during the previous Summer Games in 2004, a total of 16 world records were set in 13 events. While the Beijing Olympic pool clearly was faster than the one at Athens in 2004, that alone cannot account for the difference.) -- The average lifespan of men’s swimming world records before the 2008 Olympics was 680 days. That dropped to 382 days after the Olympics. There are now only three world records older than two years. -- The average duration of women’s world records before the Beijing Games was 921 days. That dropped to 247 days. Only one world record is older than two years. -- The men’s 100-meter freestyle record first went under 48 seconds in 2000. Only one man had done it before 2008. Eleven men have done it in 2008. -- Sixty-six (66!) Olympic records were set in Beijing. (My comparison: at the previous Olympics with an indoor pool, 2000 in Sydney, there were 38 Olympic records set.)
Australia and the United States, the sport’s major powers, have realized what a farce this is and have called for bans on the suits that utterly transformed the sport.
If that happens, swimming will be left with a mess like the one track and field has with the dozen world records that still exist from 20 years ago, when most fans feel that state-sponsored Soviet Bloc doping (and catch-us-if-you-can doping in the United States) were significant factors in the setting of nearly all those records.
Ban the suits now, and swimming’s 2008 records may stand for decades.
That would be no more preposterous than the current situation, when swimming’s records stand for nothing.
-- Phillip Hersh