Editorial: Swimming shambles can be blamed on Fina's folly

Opinion

It is difficult to recall any sports administrators shooting themselves so comprehensively in the foot as those who sit on Fina, swimming's governing body. Michael Phelps, the sport's biggest star, says swimming is a shambles. Even that barely suffices for a standard of governance so inept it has made a showpiece world championships in Rome a subject of ridicule.

Fina's folly has been its failure to deal effectively with new performance-enhancing polyurethane swimming suits until the eve of the championships. Even then, under pressure from swimming federations, it erred by restricting suit material to textiles only from next year. That has left polyurethane-clad swimmers free to rewrite the record books at the event. They have obliged, setting 29 world records in its first five days.

Swimming's governors had plenty of warning of this threat. The process began at the Beijing Olympics and accelerated last year when all-polyurethane suits were introduced. According to German swimmer Britta Steffen, the extra buoyancy and added forward propulsion provided by these make her feel "like a speedboat". Most tellingly, it has negated the importance of body position, core strength and muscle fatigue, previously key aspects of swimming. The impact was clearly evident when Phelps, swimming in an old-style suit, lost in Rome for the first time in major competition since 2005.

Some argue that swimming should embrace the new technology of the polyurethane suits, and for a time Fina was flummoxed by the manufacturers. But when technology masks athletes' failings in technique to such a degree, a sport loses out in both purity of performance and equality of opportunity. Fina, belatedly, has acknowledged this. But not before allowing swimming's record book to be littered with ill-deserved and hard-to-beat times.

It really is a shambles.