I've attempted to swim off Dubai's beaches and can confirm it is not a pleasant experience. The sea is salty and hot. FINA could not have selected a better destination to discuss how to get out of the hot water it has recently found itself in.

Swimsuits, the skin-tight, scientifically developed, superhero costumes favoured by Olympians have made competitive swimming a mockery.

The statistics go something like this – 100 world records have been broken since their introduction over a year ago. That sort of number is what most juries would feel provides strong enough evidence for a conviction.

Yep, these babies make you go faster. These babies are steroids in a suit.

The high-tech swimsuits (part-engineered by NASA) are just one issue that challenges the relevance of the sport.

Australia is, possibly, the only country in the world that obsesses over its celebrity swimmers every four years.

The rest of the world couldn't care less.

Even in the US, the homeland of Olympic wonder Michael Phelps, Average Joe may know about his medal haul and drug bust but they'd struggle to name what the medals were actually for.

As Anna Kessel highlighted in The Guardian last week, athlete Michael Johnson suggested he'd have won eight medals at a single Olympic Games if he had been able to run forwards, backwards and sideways on the track.

Ouch. But Johnson does have a point.

Swimming is already behind the eight-ball when facing challenges to make it interesting.

The likely winner is usually determined before the race begins with their previous times, if not by a competitor's ability to get off the block quickly and maintain a lead.

Swimming's broader appeal beyond anything more than a participatory sport is further handicapped by the "action" taking place underwater.

Made for TV? We think not.

"FINA reaffirms that it will continue monitoring the evolution of sport equipment with the main objective of keeping the integrity of the sport," stated a FINA press release after the Dubai meeting.

Great in theory but they may have missed the point.

The best bet for swimming to truly reflect pure athleticism would be to do away with swimsuits – altogether.

That radical concept returns the sport to raw competition and would no doubt inspire mass interest and widespread passion among the viewing public.

The ironic flipside is that it would probably lose primetime commercial TV coverage but maybe allow SBS to step up and fill it's after 10pm timeslot nicely.

Yes, that's flippant but no more absurd than performance-enhancing skin-tight suits.


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