In this blog post, we’ll explore the controversy over full-body swimsuits as we consider the boundaries between technological advancement and human performance in sports.
The 2008 Beijing Olympics saw a major upheaval in the swimming events. A groundbreaking invention called the full-body swimsuit became commonplace, and the athletes who wore them broke a slew of records. More than just reducing the swimmers’ resistance in the water, the swimsuit was seen as a piece of equipment that compensated for human physical limitations. Then, in 2009, Paul Wiedemann broke the world record in a full-body swimsuit, which led to accusations of “technological doping,” and in January 2010, the World Swimming Association announced a ban on full-body swimsuits.
While technological advancements have pushed the limits of existing records, why have full-body swimsuits been criticized rather than celebrated? To answer this question, we first need to understand why drug doping was banned in the first place. In the paper ‘Humanities and Social Sciences: Why is doping immoral? A Critical Examination of the Anti-Doping Discourse”, doping is immoral because it harms athletes’ health, spreads substance abuse in society, and undermines the naturalness of sport. However, full-body swimsuits have been stigmatized as technical doping, even though they do not harm athletes’ health or contribute to the social spread of substance abuse. People have come to believe that full-body swimsuits compromise the naturalness of the sport.
What is the naturalness of sport? Sports are activities that challenge human limits, as the Olympic motto “Citius, Altius, Fortius” suggests: “Faster, higher, stronger”. The nature of sports means that you have to compete and set records based on purely human abilities. However, in modern sports, technology is already heavily involved. For example, in the case of running, compared to the ancient Olympics, where athletes competed naked, modern competitions in functional sneakers have already added tools to pure human ability. However, there’s nothing against wearing sneakers. This is because sneakers are so commonplace in our daily lives.
Why do people only want to compete with purely human abilities in sports? Why do they want to exclude the products of technological development from sports? To answer these questions, we need to think about human technological development. Humans have constantly developed technologies to overcome the inconveniences of life. Refrigerators were developed to preserve food and cars were invented to move quickly. Technological advancements have helped improve our quality of life, but there are also concerns that they have diminished our inherent abilities. For example, with the advent of cell phones, people no longer memorize phone numbers, which has led to fears of memory loss. But despite these concerns, people are not giving up the convenience of technology.
Media portrayals of the future of humanity often depict humans as being more cerebral and less physically active, with large heads and slender limbs, like the aliens in the movie ET. These portrayals are bizarre and negative, and people subconsciously think, “I don’t want that to happen to me. We have a fear that technology can transform us into something less than human. To combat this fear, we are very resistant to the introduction of new technologies in sports, where we compete with our unique physical abilities.
But how much is “pure” human performance? In the ancient Olympics, where all athletes are said to have competed in the nude, there was no need to question the naturalness of these sports. But in modern sports, where a variety of “tools” are used, including clothing, footwear, and more, it’s unclear how much of an impact these tools have on testing human performance. The reason why technologies like performance sneakers have become part of modern sports is because they are already deeply ingrained in our daily lives. The resistance to the introduction of new technology in sports depends on how commonplace it is in our lives.
In other words, people are more likely to resist the introduction of technology into sports if it feels like a big disconnect from their lives. In the case of the full-body swimsuit in question, it requires the assistance of another person to put it on and takes 15 minutes to put on. This is a departure from the norms of modern society, and gives the impression of artificial technological intervention, unlike a normal swimsuit. This is probably why there was so much resistance to the idea of a full-body swimsuit. As you can see, the acceptance of technology in sports is a very subjective decision that varies depending on the era. Some argue that it”s better to standardize and unify the swimsuits than to ban them altogether.
Therefore, the naturalness of sports that people want to see is a direct competition of human physical abilities, without artificial technological interventions that are uncomfortable from the general perspective of people living in that era. Through sports, people want to see that humans are capable of excelling without relying on technology. For this reason, there is a resistance to the use of new technologies to generate more strength and speed in sports. Of course, as technology continues to improve, there may come a time in the future when new technologies will naturally be incorporated into sports. However, people will try to prevent that moment from happening by labeling the introduction of technology in sports as technological doping, in order to preserve a kind of ego that says “no” to the question of whether humans are lesser beings without technology, and to bolster that argument.
