Slow suits, slow times at Australian swim trials

BRISBANE, Australia — Olympic champion Stephanie Rice set the bar low when she was training in her Brisbane pool this past month for the Australian swim trials. Out of her head were the blistering times she set while establishing individual medley world records — one since broken — and winning both gold medals over 200 and 400 IM distances at Beijing in 2008. Instead, with the sleek full-length polyurethane suits that she and most elite swimmers wore in the last two years now banned by the sport's governing body and replaced by the traditional textile suits, Rice went back three years to establish a benchmark for her training times. "I could only look to 2007, when I had just begun, to try to get a feel for where I was," Rice said. The 21-year-old Australian is in good company at this week's Australian trials in Sydney for the Commonwealth Games and Pan-Pacific championships. She will soon be joined by hundreds of other elite swimmers around the world as they experience the post-polyurethane blues: how to improve on the 255 world records set since early 2008 when the sleek suits were first handed out to swimmers. The Australian championships in March 2008 — then the Olympic trials — were where records started falling. Rice set two herself in her specialties. And the meet being held this week at the Sydney Olympic pool is the first involving one of the top swim nations since the ban on the suits began Jan. 1: now it's shorts for men and shoulder-to-knee textile suits for women. Brenton Rickard received a quick illustration of how much difference the suits meant to his world record-setting time in the Rome pool last year at the world championships — one of 43 set there. Rickard broke the world 100-meter breaststroke mark with a time of 58.58 seconds. On Wednesday night, his time in qualifying first for Thursday's final at the Australian titles was 1:00.80 — nearly two seconds slower. While the swimmers might seem like they're treading water for a while, Australia's new head coach Leigh Nugent believes the ban will restore some credibility to the sport tainted by fast times caused by swimmers basically floating above the water in the buoyant suits. "It was like, 'How hard is it to break one of these?', whereas traditionally it's incredibly hard," Nugent said of the records. "If we have lost it, yeah, tomorrow will be the start," of regaining credibility. There have been some exceptions: Australian backstroker Emily Seebohm set the fastest women's 100-meter time in history in a textile suit (59.25 seconds) at last month's New South Wales titles. That time would have won the 2007 world title in Melbourne. "We will measure by times pre-2009 and maybe 2008, but we won't be looking for a soft option," Nugent said. "We still want them to get as high up on the (current) world rankings as they can." On the plus side is that new, inexperienced swimmers just might get a slender advantage over their more high-profile teammates who traditionally may have seen the advanced versions of swimsuits before the lesser-lights. On Wednesday night in Sydney, 14-year-old Yolane Kukla became the youngest swimmer to qualify for the Australian team since Ian Thorpe in 1997. Kukla defeated the reigning world champion in the 50-meter butterfly, Marieke Guehrer, who is 10 years older, to win her first national title. "I only came in here expecting to do PBs (personal bests), and I am really shocked even to get into that race. I think I am a bit overwhelmed," Kukla said. Thorpe was 14 years, 168 days when he was selected for the 1997 Pan-Pacific championships, just a week younger than Kukla will be (14 years and 175 days) when the national team is named on Sunday for the New Delhi Commonwealth Games in October. Rice will be on that team, and if her predictions hold true, her 400-meter individual medley mark of 4 minutes, 29.45 seconds she set at the Beijing Games will still be the benchmark in New Delhi. American Ariana Kukors supplanted Rice as the 200 IM record holder, her time of 2:06.15 one of those 43 set last year in Rome. "In terms of my races like the 200 IM, (Kukors' mark) is almost 2.5 seconds faster than what I did in Olympics and I don't know whether there's that much improvement in me to be able to go 2.5 seconds faster than that," Rice said. "I'd like to come as close as I can to it, but I don't know if it will ever happen." Rice was asked in a recent Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio interview if records established during the era of the controversial suits should be abolished. "I think that you can't ever really take away someone's records and someone's times because they've obviously achieved it legally," Rice said. "But it's just sort of hard now because they're so far ahead of where we're going to be once this year starts up competitively because of the new suits that have now come in are definitely not to that sort of standard." She suggests that more than asterisks be used in the record books. "I think what would be good is to sort of have two lots of world records," Rice said. "A lot of world records that are going to start now, because obviously those ones that were achieved in '09 are not going to be broken for maybe 10 or 20 years." – AP