The battle between the haves and the have-nots has reached a fever pitch in the buildup to the NCAA Division I Men’s Championship Swim Meet, which opens Thursday in College Station, Texas. Those teams with it face far better odds of winning and setting new records than those without it.
Practice? Supplements? Training? Luck? Nah, nothing like that. It’s the $550 Speedo LZR, the same swimsuit that caused such a ruckus at the Olympics last year. Some 91 percent of gold medalists in Beijing wore the suit. So you can imagine the chase for the gold the all-body suit is causing as it filters into the NCAA.
Critics and fans alike point to the numbers. Swimmers have set 82 world records wearing the Speedo LZR since it hit the scene last year. That compares to 15 in the past seven Olympic years. That sums it up from a competitive standpoint, but my objection to the Speedo has always come from a more personal perspective.
The suit covers swimmers from their ankles to their shoulders. That means no more rippled torsos to enjoy while watching the sport. The eye candy allure of swimming competitions has dropped considerably. It’s a shallow argument, I know, but one I’m comfortable making as a sports fan who is gay.
Nevertheless, the suit has caused an arms race, so to speak, that is reaching its frenzy in College Station this weekend.
A controversial about-face by the National Collegiate Athletic Association in September has turned college swimming upside down this season. Programs that never spent more than a few hundred dollars to outfit their athletes had to beg, borrow and scrounge to come up with nearly $20,000 for a season’s supply of the new generation of superfast, superexpensive swimsuits like the ones Michael Phelps wore in the Beijing Olympics.
In total, swimmers have set 82 world records wearing the Speedo LZR since its introduction last year, compared with an average of 15 in the past seven Olympic years. These results have caused a frenzy in a sport that has always seemed largely immune from the influence of technology.
“It’s like having one pole-vaulter using a fiberglass pole and another using a wooden pole,” said Phil Whitten, executive director of the College Swim Coaches Association. “It’s an absolute mess.”
FINA is digging in, announcing that it will investigate the suit and whether it enhances performance. Oddly enough, as college teams race to find the money to pay for outfitting their entire roster with the suits, the Speedo apparently falls apart after a few swims.
Back to eye candy. Coaches are also complaining that the LZR and others like it give flabby swimmers an advantage.
They make swimmers more buoyant and have an ultra-smooth exterior that glides through the water far more easily than skin. Most troubling to coaches, the suits seem to help the flabby, lazier swimmers the most, because their fat gets compressed but remains more buoyant than dense muscle, allowing them to float higher in the water and swim faster.
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a flabby college (or Olympic) swimmer. Well, at least flabby by normal human standards. Maybe they are just gay fat. But shouldn’t they get the suit, too?
Matt Hennie blogs on Atlanta’s gay sports scene (and other stuff) at Project Q Atlanta.
on Mar 24th, 2009 at 4:13 PM
I’m a college swimmer and have to say the suit is pretty amazing. I wore it for my meet this year and it felt as if I were being pulled through the water. They cannot take it off the market after a year of swims, though.
on Mar 25th, 2009 at 1:58 PM
The suit controversy is in the midsts of being resolved. Not only is it hurting the sport in the pool, but athletic departments as well. Schools don’t have the money to buy 30 $500 suits each season to remain competitive and get rankings and times. If the NCAA doesn’t address this (as FINA has chosen not to address it) there will be a substantial amount of Men’s Teams that will be forced to be dropped. I’ve heard a few different scenarios to where the new suits would only be able to be used at the NCAA Championship meet, and jammers and briefs would only be accepted the rest of the season. Just rumors though
on Mar 25th, 2009 at 2:07 PM
Hey Andrew:
When are nationals?
Huge congrats for winning the 50 freestyle at the Big Ten finals!
on Mar 25th, 2009 at 5:49 PM
The NCAA really ought to not allow these. Not because of the eye candy, but the NCAA has ruined IMHO several sports with their tough restrictions or lack of consideration to limits that would better the sport.
on Mar 25th, 2009 at 7:20 PM
These suits that have been approved by FINA and the NCAA for 2009 competition really have changed the entire future of our sport. I must say, however, that I have worn the Speedo LZR, the TYR Tracer, and the Blue70. I’m a big fan of the LZR, Blue70, but the new suit that has come out is the TYR Titon, which is AMAZING! I tried it on today, and plan on wearing it this week at NCAA Men’s Swimming National Championships. No matter how against the technology I am, in principle, there is no logical reason not to use the suits when everyone else is. This is sports, this is competition, if we’re going to allow them to be used, we need to utilize them. Now, the NCAA and FINA have a very tough situation on their hands to settle. They suits were okayed for a year, what will next year bring? Time standards raised again after being lowered? Will we take a step back after a huge leap forward?
on Mar 26th, 2009 at 3:58 PM
Yup, at FINA’s meeting two weeks ago, the leadership left intact permission for full bodysuit coverage at the upcoming world swimming championships in Rome. For more details, here’s the link: http://www.fina.org/project/images/help/the%20dubai%20charter.pdf
Let’s face it, FINA cares only peripherally what happens at yards meets such as the 2009 men’s and women’s NCAA championships. FINA self-restricts its recordkeeping to meters. Only in the rare years that the NCAAs are held in meters would FINA require strict observance to FINA rules, and only then in the case a record is broken.
At any rate, NCAA rules on swimming attire contain more words regarding the size and placement of logos than anything else; otherwise, attire is covered primarily by general language granting the NCAA swimming rules committee responsibility for taking action to protect the integrity of the sport. What amazes me is that the majority of the NCAA swimming rules committee members are from Division II and III schools – people who, one would think, might realize most acutely how the social and financial bodysuit issues have gradually damaged swimming’s integrity. They held firm against allowing these suits until just this year. Protests some months back against the committee’s decision to allow the suits were accompanied by predictions that have come true: NCAA meets this year have resulted in an uneven playing field. Expect more articles about it as the media and non-swimming public become more aware that the “miracle suits” of Beijing have created a big old mess from age group to Masters.
on Mar 27th, 2009 at 5:14 AM
As a Div III coach, I saw a ton of Blue70s at the NEWMACs conference championship this year. Considering some of these suits are buoyant on their own (just shy of being a wetsuit), it’s easy to see why times are dropping so much. Especially in Div III where student athletes are generally supposed to be students first, it seems ridiculous to allow such a financial burden to exist on these teams. As Andrew said, if everyone else is wearing them, then the only way the top swimmers will possibly be able to compete is to wear them too.
On a side note, it’s nice to see people posting from the swimming community finally – not just another thread where everyone whines about eye candy. Swimming is the single biggest medal winner for the US Olympic team, so it gets its spotlight in the major sports world every 4 years, but other than that it remains fairly obscure. Honestly, other than Michael Phelps, how many people on the street would know the names Aaron Piersol or Natalie Coughlin? The argument that the aesthetic value that’s lost by wearing full-body suits as a reason for losing fans (and by induction, possible sponsors) seems pretty far-fetched.
on Mar 29th, 2009 at 12:33 AM
The same corporate sense of monetary entitlement that has brought the world’s financial markets to the brink of implosion has permeated the advertisement dollar driven arenas of many sports to their own detriment. More money buys more technology buys more medals buys more dependence upon artificial means to overcome one’s athletic opponent. The goal so dreadfully overshadows the pursuit. The supreme redemptive value of an athlete, possessing only the body they inhabit, striving to be the best that they can sacrifice to be, will be so sorely missed, and possibly irretrievably lost, once the artifice of monetary enhancement becomes de riguer. The Greeks were definitely on to something when they required their athletes to be naked to ensure that they hid no “alternative means” to win their physical bouts. As entertaining as the call for a return to athletic nudity may be, the underlying guarantee that naked athletes can’t hide anything “up their sleeve” may be once again reestablished to ascertain that the domination we witness is truly based upon each individual’s superiority at the moment of competition. Enough said?
on Mar 29th, 2009 at 4:44 PM
At least in swimming there is a performance benefit!
In wrestling, the past 8 years have seen the widespread adoption of the puritanical American collegiate ‘Jam leg’ singlet because of international pressures from FILA.
Prior to this, the most popular singlets were low cut high leg-crotch lycra that really accentuated a wrestlers musculature, and provided no added ‘grip area’.
The new singlets make thick bears look like sausages busting out of their casings.
The pressures come from the very powerful wrestling nations in FILA, the Muslim nations, all the STANs, the former CCCP states e.g… KahzakiStan, KrygiStan, Turkmenistan, etc.. plus Iran, Georgia, Turkey, and Azerbejian.. Throw in the Ukraine, the Balkans, and Armnenia and you have ~70% of Olympic medals in wrestling going to Muslims. I swear there is something genetic in the 500 mile radius of Steppes of Central Asia that makes for great wrestlers..
The strange customs of Islam that covers women in burkas and also overvalues their men causing an abnormally high male-female ration has got to be causing some problems for the Ayotollahs who punish both loose women and homosexual behavior with torture and death.
In short male homosexuality is anathema to their culture and religion, but they do it every chance they get.
Wrestling is the closest male contact some men can get.
So the solution was to demand that FILA impose less revealing unsexy singlets, and to stop the age old practice of naked weigh-ins.
The weigh-in was always done naked in the presence of your opponent, and many a match was won on the scales. Remember, it is a double edged sword… A big weapon may imply strength & virility, but it also weighs more, forcing you to another weight category.
Now add in the PC of women’s wrestling, demanding the same singlet that ‘covers’ the nipples, and you have an unprecedented political alliance of polar opposites against the male physique.
We cannot win.
Thankfully for a while we saw snug UFC sqcuts in submission wrestling, but even this is now succumbing to the baggy board short that is less revealing given they must wear cups.
It is an old canard that Greeks competed nude in wrestling.
We have overwhelming evidence of the leather thongs they wore.
You have to remember the sexual procilivites of the poets & artisans who idealised and wrote about the Greeks, and take it with a grain of salt. It is simply PC wishful thinking
No wrestler in his right mind wants to fight naked… as we have seen with UFC, where they are bound up and cupped like the had the crown jewels because the style permits brutual knee blows & kicks.
The singlet and the less violent FILA rules make a cup unnecessary and even a problem for Olympic wrestling.
With swimming, given the split second time differentials, I do not see how anyone can eliminate them from being used.