Arena Company Position about Racing Swimwear Approval

With regard to the decisions taken by the FINA Executive on June 19, 2009 and made public yesterday concerning the racing swimsuits subject to re-examination under the transitory FINA regulations in force (the “Dubai Charter”), Arena is pleased to learn that the latest version of Powerskin X-Glide has been approved.

As a consequence, 4 styles of Arena Powerskin X-Glide racing suits (man full body long leg, woman full body long leg with zip and open back, man pant) will be made available on time for the forthcoming Swimming World Championships in Rome.

All tests run by some of the best swimmers in the Arena Elite Team (e.g. Alain Bernard and Milorad Cavic), clearly demonstrated that the approved version of Powerskin X-Glide totally maintains its level of performance, whilst being fully compliant with the FINA guidelines.

Although Arena is fully committed to continue its open and loyal cooperation with FINA, which is at present having to deal with the tough task of making sure that the world of swimming is able to overcome the recent turmoil of the last 18 months, we must underline that the decisions released yesterday do not seem to truly aid the cause of full clarity in relation to the racing swimsuit controversy.

On June 18, besides modified prototypes, Arena presented to FINA Swimwear Commission a set of incontrovertible, scientific results (following a quantitative experiment run in cooperation with the University of Bologna – Italy) proving that the original Powerskin X-Glide suit is not generating any air trapping effect.

This is why Arena is surprised and truly disappointed to discover that its request to reconsider the approval of the original version of Powerskin X-Glide was not accepted, whereas – apparently – the same requests were considered differently by FINA when related to other racing suits based on similar technologies.

We also have to remark that requests for modifications made by FINA on May 18 turned into a one month of “freezing” of any manufacturing activities of Arena Powerskin X-Glide. FINA decision becomes even harder to accept while at the same time discovering that not all the concerned manufacturers had to undergo the same modification phase, and that some of them instead have been allowed to keep their suits unmodified, despite formerly deemed as inadmissible.

Based on the above considerations, and with the sole objective of ensuring that all swimwear manufacturers are given a fair chance to operate on an equal footing, Arena confirms that it will ask FINA to provide detailed clarifications on these points within the shortest possible time.