Phelps beaten by a 'suit'!

Peikko · July 28, 2009

ROME – First, Germany’s Paul Biedermann took down Ian Thorpe. On Tuesday, he picked off Michael Phelps, completing a dreamer’s daily double. Leading from the start, Biedermann handed Phelps his first major defeat in the 200-meter freestyle in three years at the world championships.

Biedermann shattered Phelps’s world record with a clocking of 1 minute 42.00 seconds. Phelps, who owns four of the five all-time fastest swims in the event, finished in 1:43.22. Phelps had set the world record that Biedermann broke, a 1:42.96 that he recorded on his way to Olympic gold last summer in Beijing.

The 22-year-old Biedermann, who finished fifth in the final of this race in Beijing with a time of 1:46.00, described his defeat of Phelps “a dream.” It proved his takedown of the retired Thorpe’s world record in the 400-meter freestyle on Sunday was no fluke but it also provided fuel for the polyurethane swimsuit controversy.

After the 400 freestyle, Biedermann acknowledged that his Arena X-Glide suit was an advantage. He said it makes him “really fast; honestly, about two seconds in the race.” He added, “I think the suits are destroying a little bit the sport. It’s just, put on a suit, and you’re really, really fast.”

He won’t get an argument from Phelps, who wears the less buoyant Speedo LZR Racer. Phelps appeared miffed after the race. An hour before the final, officials with FINA, the sport’s international governing body, held a press conference to announce that the suits would soon be banned, but not soon enough to please anybody except perhaps the Italian-based swimsuit manufacturers Jaked and Arena.

The ban on polyurethane suits was ratified, as were the guidelines for how much skin the racing suits can cover. When the new rules go into effect, suits will stretch only between the waist and the knees for men and from the shoulders to the knees for women. And yet, there is no firm date for when the reforms will take effect.

Dr. Julio Maglione, the president of FINA, said a scientific committee will be convened to determine what constitutes a “textile” and the process could delay the ban until the spring of 2010 – time enough for dozens more records to fall.

“We want to do it as soon as possible,” Cornel Marculescu, the FINA executive director, said.

No matter the bugs in the short term, easing out the new suits and returning to some version of the old is necessary for the sport’s long-term health, said Phelps’s coach, Bob Bowman.

“The next step in the bodysuits are thing like biofeedback and stuff like that that are insidious,” Bowman said. “And so it’s kind of like how do you stop it? It’s what’s next that’s the problem.”

While the scientific committee hired by FINA huddles over the definition of “textile,” milestones will continue to be ground into dust. The first two days of racing at these world championships have produced the first woman under four minutes in the 400-meter freestyle and the second, third, fourth and fifth men under 59 seconds in the 100 breaststroke.

The polyurethane foil on the Jaked 01 and the coating of rubber on the Arena X-Glide have turned the swimmers’ bodies into sleek kayaks, and buoy swimmers’ confidence. “People believe they can do more,” said Markus Rogan, a back-stroker from Austria.

The suits streamline the swimmers’ bodies and stretch their minds. In the semifinals of the 200 I.M., when the Jaked-clad Ariana Kukors became the first woman under 2:08, Stephanie Rice of Australia, whose world record she broke, said, “It really opened my mind up to new times. I really had to refocus my goals.”

In the final, Rice broke the 2:08 barrier and came within four-hundredths of a second of dipping under 2:07, which she hadn’t thought possible a few months ago. Kukors, who won the gold in 2:06.16, became like a Sherpa for Rice, guiding her to heights she hadn’t thought reachable.

“I’m really in favor of the suits because we’re the most popular boring sport in the world and so we need and only survive on records,” :rofl: Rogan said. “So we’re going to need whatever we can do to keep doing records.”