The Swimsuit Ban: When Swimming Broke 200 World Records and Then Outlawed the Cause

Records stopped meaning what they had meant

Between 2008 and 2009, world records in swimming fell at a rate the sport had never seen — reported at around 200 across the period, with 43 at the 2009 world championships in Rome alone.

Athletics wrote its equipment limits before the equivalent crisis rather than after — see the athletic shoe regulations.

At the 2008 Olympics, the overwhelming majority of world records set were achieved by swimmers wearing one particular suit.

When records fall in that volume, the obvious explanation is not that a generation of swimmers improved simultaneously. Something had changed, and it was not the athletes.

What the suits did

Full-body polyurethane and neoprene suits worked on three fronts at once.

They reduced drag through the water. They compressed the body into a more efficient shape. And they added buoyancy, raising the swimmer higher — which reduces the wetted area and therefore the drag again.

That last effect is the one that broke the sport’s premise. Swimming is a contest against water resistance, and a suit that lifts a body out of the water is not making a swimmer faster. It is removing some of the water.

The ban, and its date

FINA — now World Aquatics — banned the suits, with regulations taking effect on 1 January 2010.

The reasoning was that the advantage came from equipment rather than the athlete, and that a sport whose records are set by a purchase decision has stopped measuring what it claims to measure.

That is the same principle behind World Athletics’ wind limit and its facility certification requirements for records: a performance is only comparable if the conditions producing it are controlled.

The records were kept

Here is the decision that still shapes the sport.

The records were not annulled. They were set legally, under the rules in force, by swimmers who complied with them. Deleting them would have punished athletes for using equipment their sport had approved.

So swimming ended up in an unusual position: a set of records standing in the books, achieved in equipment that is now illegal, which subsequent swimmers must beat without it.

Some of those times stood for well over a decade. A swimmer breaking one is, in a real sense, producing a better performance than the number suggests.

Why keeping them was still right

The alternative was worse.

Annulling legal results would establish that a governing body can retrospectively delete compliance — that following the rules is no protection if the rules change later.

Compare anti-doping’s strict liability, which is harsh precisely because it is applied consistently and prospectively. Sport can be severe about rules. It becomes something different if it is severe about rules that did not exist at the time.

So swimming accepted an awkward record book as the price of not setting that precedent, and its regulations now police equipment before it reaches the pool rather than after.

More on how sport is governed is in how sport is run.