Was a swimsuit really banned for being too fast?

Swimmers train for years to shave a hundredth of a second off their times. Yet in 2008 and 2009 there was a strange stretch when world records tumbled at an astonishing rate.

What drew everyone’s attention was not how the athletes swam but what they were wearing. Some swimsuits made swimmers so fast that they were eventually banned from international competition.

2008: the record rush begins

On February 13, 2008, the swimwear brand Speedo unveiled a new racing suit, the LZR Racer. It was developed with help from the Australian Institute of Sport and wind tunnel facilities at NASA, the US space agency, among others, and its fabric combined nylon and elastane with polyurethane, a synthetic plastic. Speedo said it cut skin friction drag by 24 percent compared with its previous suits.

The effect was immediate. Within a week of its release, swimmers wearing it were setting world records. At the Beijing Olympics later that year, 94 percent of swimming gold medals were won in the LZR Racer, and 23 of the 25 world records set there were broken by swimmers wearing it.

An uproar in Japan

The suit caused a stir in Japan too. At the time, the Japan Swimming Federation had swimwear contracts with three Japanese companies, Mizuno, Descente and Asics, and wearing Speedo had simply not been on the table.

Then, at the Japan Open in June 2008, swimmers wearing the LZR Racer set 16 of the 17 new records at the meet. Kosuke Kitajima also broke the world record in the men’s 200-meter breaststroke wearing the suit. Faced with those results, the federation announced on June 10 that its swimmers could wear it at the Beijing Olympics. Kitajima went on to win gold in both the 100-meter and 200-meter breaststroke in Beijing.

The “Plastic Games”

The arms race only intensified. In 2009, other manufacturers rolled out full-body suits that used even more polyurethane. These suits were said to make swimmers more buoyant, and times kept falling.

At the 2009 World Championships in Rome, in July, around 43 world records were set, and the meet was nicknamed, not kindly, the “Plastic Games.” In the men’s 200-meter freestyle, Germany’s Paul Biedermann, wearing a polyurethane suit, beat Michael Phelps, winner of eight gold medals at the Beijing Olympics, and took the title in a world record of 1:42.00.

2010: the ban

Were the records down to the swimmers or to the suits? People began talking about “technological doping,” and on July 24, 2009, swimming’s world governing body FINA (now World Aquatics) voted to ban full-body suits.

From January 1, 2010, only suits made of textile fabrics were allowed at international competitions, and the area they could cover was limited: from the navel to the knee for men, and from the shoulders to the knee for women. FINA explained that “swimming is a sport essentially based on the physical performance of the athlete.”

Some of the records set with the help of those suits stood for a long time. Biedermann’s 1:42.00 in the 200-meter freestyle is still the world record 17 years later.