04/26/24
July 28, 2009
German Swimmer Stuns Michael Phelps: German swimmer Paul Biedermann handed Michael Phelps a loss in the 200-meter freestyle Tuesday — his first defeat in a major individual race since 2005. "The suits make a difference," said Biedermann, who wore a Arena X-Glide. "I hope there will be a time when I can beat Michael Phelps without these suits."
FINA has made a pretty terrible blunder by not reining in those suits sooner. You know things are bad when even the winner believes he could not have won without a technological assist.
posted by bperk at 07:45 AM on July 29, 2009
FINA has made a pretty terrible blunder by not reining in those suits sooner.
It's hard to see how they could have done so. They announced a ban in May, got threatened with legal action by the manufacturers, and the FINA executive reversed the ban in June.
As I said in the follow-up to my earlier post, a lot has changed in a year: in Beijing, the LZR was the only high-tech suit in town, and Speedo the only major sponsor of elite swimmers. Now you're not just dealing with the technology but the duelling endorsement deals: Phelps has been under contract to Speedo since he was 15, and his six-year deal runs out at the end of the year, which I assume has been in the back of many officials' minds. (When Phelps' coach says he won't swim again until the new rules are implemented, he's thinking about that deal as well as the results in the pool.)
As it stands, this year's world championships are a joke: you have Jaked and Arena and other manufacturers dishing out suits at the meet, endorsees dumping their sponsors' suits, and swimmers acting like it's the crazy last hour of a party before the cops arrive to break things up.
posted by etagloh at 12:33 PM on July 29, 2009
Ah, those wacky Germans...