Researcher: Swimming Records Won't Fall Easily in London

At the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, 21 new world records and 30 Olympic records were set - thanks in large part to controversial high-tech polyurethane swimsuits that increased swimmers' buoyancy and have since been swimsuit technology.

For that reason alone, fans of the sport should expect only a handful of world records to fall in London when swimming events get under way on Saturday. As Joel Stager of Indiana University's Councilman Center for the Science of Swimming wrote Thursday on the hydro+logic blog, "over time, swim times should improve in ever­smaller increments as swimmers approach a theoretical limit to human performance. Unusually steep improvements in time tend to point to some form of recently introduced 'bias' to the contests. Such a jump occurred in 2008."

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