I have followed this whole swimsuit issue quite closely. Anyone involved in the sport quickly recognized that the suit made a significant difference in a swimmers performance. It was obviously that someone had not done their homework before adopting it as legal or as many suspect there was some hanky panky in the higher levels of sport to get it adopted. Most of the swim coaches I work with describe it as a wetsuit, an obvious aid to buoyancy. It looked like the NCAA was not going to legalize it for use in NCAA competition, a good move. Then I found out last week that under threat of a lawsuit from one of the manufactures it is legal for use in NCAA competition. Swimming is a sport under the gun with programs being dropped; now you are talking about it costing more to outfit a swimmer than a football player, think of the implications of that? I feel this is symptomatic of a bigger malaise affecting sport. There is this obsession with chasing records instead of focus on competition that is the essence of sport. Where can this go? What would happen if we turned off the clock and just raced? Isn’t that the essence of sport? To keep pushing the envelope, chasing records leads to the temptation to dope. Where does it stop? Perhaps a Roman circus would be appropriate. We are close to that now. When will we wake up?
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