When Paul Biedermann, of Germany, won his national 100m freestyle title in a new home record of 48.39 in Berlin yesterday, heads hardly turned. A fine time but nothing that is going to threaten the likes of 46.94 and 47.05 and so forth. 

Look back to Athens 2004 and recall the 100m free Olympic podium:

Another metre or two and Thorpey on a roll into the wall may have caused an even greater upset.

At the time, Thorpe's swim was amazing and was widely considered to be so. Did his suit help? Yes, by his own admission. But the Australian, in full body suit with arms, was covered in textile and not a surf-boarding non-textile fabric of the kind enhancing performances in the pool to a truly significant level today. The bodysuit was a problem from its introduction in 1998. The 2008-09 generation of suits go well beyond that initial blip. Combine suit engineering of today with non-textile fabrics and bonded seams and you have potential for biofeedback. Some swimmers are already reporting that they already feel that their suits are altering their response under stress, that fatigue is removed or delayed, that lung function appears to be improved. 

Back to 2004: Thorpey had become the first man to win Olympic medals in the 100m, 200m and 400m, the latter two efforts producing gold. Great as those middle-distance efforts were, it is the 100m of Thorpe that we focus on here and now. Thorpey returned home from Athens with the following all-time status in the 100m:

• 48.56: 9th fastest performer ever; 28th best performance (multiple entries)

Excellent

By the time we came round to the next Olympic year, on January 31, 2008, Thorpey, by then retired, had slipped a little over three and a half years, as you would expect:

• 48.56: 18th performer; 47th performance

What you might expect

Just 17 months later, here is where Thorpey stands with his Olympic bronze-medal-winning effort of 2004 (that's not 1928 or 1956 or even the ancient history of the 1990s, as those folk who like to speak of dinosaurs put it falsely, but just four and a half years ago):

• 48.56: 43rd performer; 258th performance

What you might not expect, not even close

Let's put those together for ease of viewing:

• Oct 2004: 48.56: 9th fastest performer ever; 28th best performance (multiple entries)
• Jan 2008: 48.56: 18th performer; 47th performance
• Jun 2009: 48.56: 43rd performer; 258th performance

Just the kind of slump that an Olympic medallist would expect, right? Wrong. There is nothing like it any time in swimming history when looking back at where a bronze medal winner at one Games sits in the world ranks less than four years on.

It's all about the swimmer not the suit. Not. The suit is overshadowing all genuine effort and achievement and will continue to do so until FINA bites the bullet and tells suit makers what they cannot make for the race pool. And here's the darker theme of e-mails doing the rounds around the world of swimming right now: how much doping is being masked by the suits?