A suggestion for FINA

Swimming's World Championships 2009 are a joke, a mockery, a sideshow. The same thing has been done this year to the sport through "technology" (otherwise known as just adding buoyancy to swimsuits) as was done to the sport by the East German and then Chinese women through steroids -- made it sad to watch. World Records are meaningless. Sadly, Dara Torres has to live through this twice (actually, more like three times, her career stretches back to the last of the East German sham and through the Chinese rise and fall).

But the athletes who win and set records now are only doing what good athletes should do -- trying to win. A few like Rebecca Adlington and Michael Phelps have taken a stand and aren't wearing the newest cheating suits, and hoping FINA will get it's act together quickly. I hope so too.

But here's where FINA has a problem. The records were set under the existing rules. And they are ridiculous records.

In track-and-field, legitimate WRs are only set when the wind is lower than a certain speed. If the wind is higher, the time gets recorded, but is labeled "wind-aided". Everybody is on the same page, weather-wise.

Post-Worlds, FINA should immediately label any record set by an athlete wearing the Jaked or the X-glide or any suit younger than the Speedo LZR as "suit-aided", and rewrite the record books back to Beijing. Now, I'd actually be tempted to tell them to disqualify the LZR too, but so many athletes were wearing it in Beijing, and the records being broken seemed still reasonable, that the sport at the time of the 2008 Olympics should set the baseline.

Baseball suffered when steroid-pumped sluggers launched moon shots nightly. Track suffered when Ben Johnson and FloJo (yes, I'm sure she did) and Marion Jones lapped the field in the 100-meter dash. The Tour de France is still recovering from the doping scandals of the last several years (and I still want to know if Floyd Landis was using testosterone???). We suffered when an Irish pretender on PEDs named Michelle Smith beat the incredible Janet Evans. And both Jenny Thompson and Shirley Babashoff deserve individual gold medals that were stolen by cheaters.

FINA, you've been here before. Get it right this time. At least this time you don't have to take away the medals. Of course, that's what you should have done to the drug cheats. This time, set a reasonable standard for suits, label the recent WRs for what they are -- ludicrous -- and put the sport back where it belongs; one of the cleanest, purest, and most challenging in the sporting world.