It’s what you wear

Saturday, Aug. 1, 2009 | 2:05 a.m.

Athletic performance long ago was simply about pure talent and hard work. It was about raw speed, strength, agility and mental toughness.

Each passing generation has produced athletes who are bigger, stronger and faster than their predecessors. They have the advantages of advanced training methods, better diets and, in many sports, more high-tech equipment. Witness track and field’s pole vault event, which evolved from the use of stiff bamboo poles to flexible Fiberglas or carbon fiber poles that send competitors to heights unthinkable decades ago.

Professional and amateur competition eventually regressed into the steroids era, with athletes rolling the dice and ingesting dangerous chemical substances to boost performance.

But the sports world has now reached absurd lows. That was made clear Tuesday at swimming’s world championships in Rome when relatively unknown German swimmer Paul Biedermann beat the Summer Olympics’ most heralded champion, Michael Phelps, in a 200-meter freestyle race. The difference? Biedermann was wrapped in 100 percent polyurethane.

Biedermann’s swimsuit was higher-tech than that worn by Phelps, who won eight gold medals in the 2008 Beijing Olympics while wearing a high-tech Speedo LZR Racer swimsuit. The full-body Arena X-Glide suit worn by the German reduces water resistance better than the Speedo that Phelps continues to wear because of contract obligations. Biedermann even conceded to reporters that the more advanced swimsuits make a difference.

FINA, swimming’s international governing body, has vowed to ban high-tech body suits beginning next year but it remains to be seen whether that indeed happens. Why wait until next year?

It used to be special when an athlete broke a world record, especially one that stood for years. Today, records are shattered seemingly at every swim meet, track and field event and other competition where human achievement is measured because someone in a laboratory discovered a better way to artificially boost performance.

It’s time to put the athlete back into athletic performance.