It's a few days before the competition is due to start and Lawrence is unveiling for the media Australia's secret weapon a high-tech, tight-fitting swimsuit, guaranteed to slice seconds off a swimmer's best times and sure to deliver gold medals aplenty. It's the counter-weapon to the performance-enhancing drugs everyone suspects are pulsing through their East German rivals. It's the new ''winged keel''; a piece of Aussie ingenuity to be sprung on an unsuspecting world.

Hooiveld, a 100m and 200m breaststroker, is beaming as her picture is taken. The normally jocular Lawrence turns serious as he's asked by a journo if this weird, bulky new creation will actually work.

''What kind of dickhead do you think I am?,'' he says. ''I would not get my kids to wear them if it did not make them go faster.''

Twenty-one years on, as the supersuit controversy rages at the world championships in Rome, this little known or little remembered attempt by Australia to revolutionise swimming through technology has striking resonance.

It tells us the sport's governing body has been seduced, rather than blindsided, by the rise of the supersuit. Because back in Australia's bicentennial year, FINA took a stand, banning the Aussie suit and keeping a lid on a Pandora's box that should have been left closed forever.

Instead, it now faces a credibility crisis, besieged by the media, public and the swimmers themselves who feel the sport is becoming a joke.

This week The Canberra Times spoke to some of the key people involved in the ill-fated Aussie supersuit episode of 1988.

And the question they all ask is how did FINA forget?

It was in Victoria in 1986 that the ball got rolling on what became known in the press as the ''seal suit''.

A Deakin University lecturer and keen surfer Brian Lowdon had done some testing on triathlon wetsuits made by surfing friend Rod Brooks, then owner of the Torquay-based Piping Hot.

For more, pick up a copy of today's Canberra Times