When Stephanie Rice, of Australia, stopped the clock at 2min 8.92sec to make herself the favourite to win the 200metres individual medley crown at the Olympic Games in Beijing, she took the number of world records established in the pool over the past five weeks to 14.

The run of world-best times coincides with the launch of the Speedo LZR Racer suit, which has been worn in 13 of the 14 world records established since February 16, the week the much-debated technological breakthrough was unleashed on the world. Some coaches have referred to the suit as “technology doping” and some are calling for Speedo to drop the bonded seams that have been developed with technology from Nasa, the American space agency.

It is not only the number of records being broken that has raised eyebrows. When Wu Yanyan, of China, recorded 2:09.72 to set a world 200 metres medley record in 1997, the world cried foul. And so it proved: Wu was suspended for steroid abuse. No one came close for ten years, until Katie Hoff, of the United States, won the world title in 2:10.05 a year ago in a race in which Rice collected bronze in 2:11.42. Now 19, Rice was expected to make progress this year, but at Olympic trials in Sydney, her improvements to world records in the 200 metres and 400 metres medley have exceeded expectations.

In the 400 metres medley, Rice's 4:31.46 shaved six seconds off her best and was nine seconds inside the time she swam to win silver behind Hoff's 4:32.89 - a world record at the time - at the World Championships in March last year. Yesterday at the trials in Sydney, Eamon Sullivan, 22, rattled the four-day-old 100 metres freestyle world record of Alain Bernard, the 24-year-old Frenchman, with a time of 47.55sec in the semi-finals. That was 0.05 shy of the global mark and a whopping 0.56 inside Sullivan's Commonwealth record.

The past five Olympiads have produced the following world record count in the lead-up to a Games: six for 1992; none for 1996; 12 for 2000, of which seven were set by Inge de Bruijn, of the Netherlands; three for 2004; and 14 for 2008 and counting. And the bulk of trials around the world are to come over the next few months.

Fina, the international federation for aquatic sports, will meet all suit-makers in Manchester on April 12 and Speedo will face pressure to remove one of the key elements of its garment: bonded seams that use a type of panel-welding technique developed by Nasa.

The question being posed by people such as Christano Portas, the head of Arena, which launched the R-Evolution suit last week, is whether the LZR Racer breaks rules that disallow “scales” or anything that could be said to be raised or ribbed from the uniform level of a suit.

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