Sixteen of the world’s leading swimming nations, including Great Britain, will demand a ban today on all bodysuits by 2010.
The move would lead to the end of “fast suits”, including the one worn by Michael Phelps, of the United States, and Rebecca Adlington, the Briton, on the way to Olympic gold medals last year.
Since the launch of the Speedo LZR Racer 17 months ago, with its Nasa-designed polyurethane panels, 135 world records have fallen to swimmers wearing the suits. If the motion is agreed, they would be forced to revert to traditional textile costumes by January 1 next year.
The political revolt took the sport’s leaders by surprise, though the suits will continue to enhance performances over eight days of racing from Sunday at the Fina World Championships in Rome.
Immediately after Mustapha Larfaoui and Cornel Marculescu, respectively the president and executive director of Fina, announced that “we cannot stop progress”, members of the international federation’s technical congress voted to ban bodysuits. Only one nation abstained, with 103 voting in favour of the change.
The new rules will go before Fina’s main congress today and it is expected that they will be rubber-stamped. As a result, the words “or swimsuit” are expected to be added to a rule that forbids the use of “any device” that may “aid to speed, buoyancy or endurance”.
Twenty-seven records have fallen in the suits this year alone. Among the latest is the women’s 100 metres freestyle, which was broken last month.
Having set the new mark of 52.56sec, half a second faster than the previous best, Britta Steffen, the Olympic champion from Germany, said: “You feel no pain. Under normal circumstances, this suit should be forbidden and I expect that by 2010 it will be. I felt like a speedboat in water and never in my life would I have believed that a human could glide like that.”
The crisis runs deeper than records: the all-time world rankings have been swamped by a tidal wave of progress, with the world record of 21.64 over 50 metres freestyle — set by Alex Popov, of Russia, in January 2008 — having been surpassed 36 times by ten men.
Over the same period, the number of men capable of racing inside a minute over 100 metres breaststroke has leapt from three to 22.
The issue divides friend and foe alike. Adlington, in the LZR, and Joanne Jackson, her Great Britain team-mate in the Hydrofoil, are at the centre of a dispute over which suit is the worst offender.
Britain officials were due to announce a blanket media ban on suit talk from this morning.
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