FINA: Cleaning up Dodge

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So we won’t get to see Michael Phelps trying to worm his way into two or three high-tech swimsuits at the World Championships in Rome in the summer.

Not that he would have tried it. As Gary Hall Jr. once said, Phelps could set world records in cutoff shorts.

But some of his swimming colleagues had been doing that sort of thing -- wiggling into multiple suits -- in what was shaping up to be a crazy, almost unregulated era after last year’s Beijing Olympics. ‘Oh, it’s been the Wild West -- way Wild West,’ USA Swimming’s Mark Schubert told me in a telephone interview last month.

Law and order -- well, sort of -- showed up in the Wild West today with word from FINA of new rules regulating the high-tech suits. FINA, the international governing body of swimming, made its announcement after three days of meetings in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates.

The move was expected after a series of recommendations proposed last month after FINA met with 16 swimsuit manufacturers in Lausanne, Switzerland.

The rules in place, which will be in effect for the World Championships in July, include a maximum buoyancy effect, a maximum thickness, limited coverage areas (suits would not extend past the shoulders or ankles and would end below the neck), and restricting swimmers to wearing one suit at a time.

FINA also said that suits of an approved model could not be customized for individual swimmers.

The governing body stated it would continue to monitor ‘the evolution of the sport equipment with the main objective of keeping the integrity of the sport.’

-- Lisa Dillman