The average viewer of the Olympic Games might not have noticed a big difference in the wardrobes of the athletes competing in swimming events compared to four years ago, but the athletes themselves certainly know there’s a difference.
In Beijing, athletes were sporting high-tech suits that helped them swim fast and led to new world records in 21 of the 32 swimming events held in a pool at the 2008 Games.
So far this Olympics just five world records have been broken (and though 13 Olympic records have been broken, all the other records were set in Beijing). People who watch the sport blame the banning of polyurethane suits, which helped athletes shatter just about every record out there.
According to Wired magazine, 43 world records were set at the World Championships in Rome in 2009, the last meet where the “super suits” were allowed. And other than that handful of records so far in London, just two others have been broken (at the 2011 Worlds in Shanghai).
Suits Allowed Different Body Types for Swimmers
The suits were billed as a way for swimmers to gain more buoyancy, but they provided another benefit for female swimmers: streamlining their shape.
Louise Burke, an Australian sports scientist and team dietician for the Australian Olympic team, said the high-tech suits were like Spanx, helping to hold in any parts of the body that might slow a swimmer down.
Burke noted that before these suits there were “body weight issues and disordered eating in swimmers,” and she worried there may be more “sculpting” and an attempt to lower body fat among swimmers in the future.
Weight Pressures in Swimming
A study performed after the 2000 Sydney Olympics bore that out, with more than half of participants saying there are weight pressures in swimming. The study, published in the Sport Journal, a publication of the United States Sports Academy, looked at 62 female swimmers from seven colleges.
The ladies ranged in weight from 99 to 190 pounds, and on average they said they wanted to lose 7.5 pounds; one swimmer said she hoped to lose 37 pounds. Forty-two percent of respondents said they thought they would swim better if they lost five pounds, and 45 percent said their suits made them conscious of their body appearance.
Eating Disorders Found in Swimmers at All Levels
The number of female swimmers with disordered eating or anorexia athletica is not known, but examples of athletes struggling to recover from eating disorders do pop up.
Amanda Beard, for example, is a seven-time Olympic gold medalist in swimming who has battled bulimia. She told a crowd at Cal Poly in 2009 that she was bulimic for 12 years, starting when she gained 25 pounds and grew eight inches between the ages of 14 and 15. The extra size slowed her down, so she started throwing up six or seven times a day to compensate.
Her problems intensified when a client she was doing a photo shoot for told her agent she needed to lose 10 pound in two weeks, and she consumed nothing but diet pills and coffee for 14 days.
A loving boyfriend – now husband – and the birth of her child have helped her see that she needs to be healthy, not super-thin.
College athletes face many of the same pressures as Olympic athletes, and indeed Beard’s bulimia was rampant when she was in college.
A University of Georgia swimmer, Anne-Marie Botek, says she suffered from anorexia for about a year when she was trying to make up for lost training time after a heart condition sidelined her for a few months. She said she lost 50 pounds before realizing she needed to control her weight in a healthy way to be strong in order to keep competing.
And in one somewhat bizarre story, from 2007, University of Northern Colorado swimmer Brittany Bethel was actually banned from campus while she tried to get her anorexia under control. Reports from the time say she had an exceptionally severe case and at one point weighed just 75 pounds. She passed out at the gym and left the hospital against medical advice, and said her “constant negative thinking” about her weight got in the way of following doctors’ advice.
(By Sarah E. White for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)
Ban of Super Suits May Bring about More Disordered Eating among Swimmers is a post from: CalorieLab - Health News & Information Blog
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