Magic formula? Cutting-edge science? Better sleep regime? Smarter work? Gene therapy? Naturally occurring generational shift? Or unnatural enhancement of a suspicious kind? Whatever the explanation, there can be no question that something big is happening in the world of freestyle sprinting. Let's stick with the men as we take a tour of speedsters with a set of statistics that lead to an undeniable conclusion that performances in the race towards the race in Beijing 2008 are an absolute aberration of all that we have known before.

What once was is no more - and much of what has come to pass has done so since Melbourne 2007.

The current all-time top 10 list in the 50m starts at 21.56 - the world record set by Eamon Sullivan (AUS) - and ends at 21.84 for Cesar Cielo (BRA), from July 2007. Go down to 20th and you get to a 22.01, which pushes the 22.03 of Pieter van den Hoogenband (NED) from Sydney 2000 (which took the bronze medal 0.05sec behind that historic shared gold of Gary Hall Jr and Anthony Ervin, USA) out of the top 20 - just a year after it had just slipped out of the top 10.

Nine of the top 20 times have all been clocked since Melbourne 2007. Of those nine men, Sullivan, Alain Bernard (FRA), Ben Wildman-Tobriner (USA), Cielo, Garrett Weber-Gale (USA) and Stefan Nystrand (SWE) have all raced below 22sec for the first time in the past year.

The wave of fast times took on new meaning when Sullivan broke Alex Popov's world record at NSW Championships last month. In doing so, he wiped 0.44sec off his best time. When Gary Hall Jr, Olympic champion in 2000 and 2004, was asked to comment, he made the point that such an improvement is rare, to say the least, and indicated that the swim had been described on decks around the world as 'suspicious'. Nothing he said is untrue.

Australia reacted by picking up a stick with which to beat Hall about the head. Pity. What they should have done was say: thanks Gary for giving us a chance to explain what's changed in the world since your day, all those (three) years ago. Perhaps Sullivan is doing amazing things in training; perhaps he does more easy speed work than the 90-100km a week that Popov got up to from time to time; perhaps he's just started to lift weights; perhaps he had a great season or two of injury-free training (the only one I've seen so far that has been repeated as the single cause of improvement); perhaps he wore 'that suit'; perhaps, perhaps, perhaps....

Whatever the explanations, clearer insight into a sprinter capable of lopping 0.44sec off his best time will doubtless be sought over the coming months. This is not a drop from 23.5 to 23.0 or even 23.0 to 22.5. This is 22.00 to 21.56: that's 0.36sec inside what was the third fastest ever until 2007 in an event that can only be decided by electronic timing, and then it is often decided not by tenths but hundredths.

I have sat for part of today and worked out the statistics of improvement and range of performances across all top 21 all-time fastest men (21 because I wanted to include Hoogie, for which I make no excuse). That ropes in everyone from Matt Biondi and Tom Jager (USA) through Popov to Hall and Ervin. The conclusion is: Sullivan is a statistical aberration. At 21, he dropped from 22.59 to 22.00 in a year (2005-2006), clocked his 2007 best of 22.05 in the Melbourne final, a performance that was clearly off the back of a decent build up (he claimed bronze in the 100m), and last month blew up a storm as the first Australian holder of the lap standard and title of world's fastest man in water (no, I don't count the little pool).

So how does his past and present form stack up against the rest of the speediest speedsters? Comparing the best 10 times ever swum by all 20 men behind the Australian record holder, the average difference between personal best and 10th best is 0.43sec. Sullivan clocks in at 0.66sec. Three others in the pack break the mould: a vast 1.07sec gulf in the world of Grevers and gaps of over 0.6sec for Bernard and Cielo. Looking back at the youthful stages of the careers of Popov, Hall and Van den Hoogenband, none have a leap of improvement of the magnitude of Sullivan's beyond their teen years, while the range from best to 10th best across their long careers has in a tight range of between 0.40 to 0.49sec, including off-seasons and Olympic years.

The one-off special swim can account for discrepancies, of course, but Sullivan's 22.00 in 2006 might have been described in that vein. A 21.56 is not quite off the chart but it surely requires graph makers to consider a redesign for the seasons ahead.

Which is where the word suspicion creeps in among the many words of praise and preening deserved of great performances. Hall Jr is not the first to speak in the terms in which he has done. He was asked a question by AAP in Australia, and he answered it. In the context of the doping woes of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, the bigger surprise than Hall's views are the expressions of surprise and alarm that they appear to have generated Down Under.

Hall Jr - who has never shied away from raising difficult issues if he felt it fair to do so (including sending an open question - one so far gone unanswered - to former teammate and Olympic champion Amy van Dyken as to how she ended up on Balco's client list) - is lambasted in Australia for having dared to utter the words suspicion and Sullivan in the same sentence.

But Hall's views were not intended as an attack on Sullivan, Australian swimming, Grant Hackett or Alan 
Thompson. It is easy to see why those parties felt the need to feel outraged. But Hall's remarks were intended to raise an issue that needs talking about. If such issues cannot be raised in the context of outstanding performances from Australians and Americans, it leaves us all weaker when we wish to raise them for any aberrations from anywhere else in the world, including China. After the Sporting Crime of the Century that was the German Democratic Republic, the last words any leaders of the swimming world should utter to a anyone raising a question in the wake of unusual performance is 'Pray Silence' (or 'shut it!', for those who appreciate the tone of the saying).

Hall Jr tells SwimNews: 'By pointing out that there is suspicion does not mean that I am 
responsible for that suspicion. It may have a lot more to do with the 
half second drop than me pointing out that the chatter on the pool 
deck suggests that such a drop, done legally, is improbable.' A description that may well attract more bullets. But he is right. It is improbable in the context of the years of experience of the 50m that Hall Jr has lived through. This is a race in which the last three Olympic podiums have been split by 0.16sec; 0.05sec and 0.11sec, an event in which sprinters spend eight years working at shaving 0.2sec or less off their best. Popov's 21.64 was deemed extraordinary, yet it came nine years after he had clocked 21.92 in the pressure cooker of an Olympic final.

Of Sullivan's drop, Hall Jr says: 'It's in the territory of drops that only cheaters have made in
 the past. To knock off so much time from Popov's record ... what is he
 doing better than Popov? This is the question most should be asking, at least the competitors in the sport. Is his technique anywhere near
 Popov's? Is he doing upwards of 100km a week? Does he have
 better mental focus or experience? Is his coach better? As a
 competitor interested in learning I am asking myself these questions
 and I can't seem to find anything that stands out. I feel that I am being condemned for asking such questions.'

He felt that he was 'only pointing out that due to the poor choices of so many athletes (many
 of them Americans) that have chosen to cheat,' eyebrows have been raised.

'I am not condemning Eamon and this isn't some
 nationalistic attack. I clearly state that it is not the fault of
 Eamon that people are going to suspect him. And the fact that he has
 been urine and blood tested isn't a dismissing argument when Marion
 Jones was tested a lot more than Eamon will be (she never failed a
 test). I am only trying to learn what he is doing right, so much
 better than everyone else in the world.'

To the casual observer, Hall's remarks will be regarded as an assault, if not on Sullivan, then certainly on Australian pride. But we here and you there reading this are not casual observers. We know what 21.56 means, we know what has happened in swimming, we lived through the years of the GDR and China, we are living now at a time when the testing programme cannot cope when (and it is when not if) gene therapies designed for cancer patients that have muscle-building properties and properties that assist the flow of blood through the veins make it (if they have not already done so) to the world of sport.

I'm in Germany as I write and on German television tonight, a news feature revealed the discussions taking place between the German government and the medical and sports communities about the dangers of gene doping. One doctor stated: 'You can already buy gene therapies on the internet. They were designed to treat cancer but we all know where some of them are headed. Right now they are not detectable but if we insist that they should be, we could make them detectable at the source stage of development. The dangers of these products are to some extent unknown if taken out of the context for which they were designed.'

In the days of the GDR, pharmacologists developed not only Oral Turinabol (the little blue steroid pills) but other substances that had never been tested on animals or clinically trialled before being administered to minors - and those minors were not all Olympic and world medal winners, they were people we never saw, guinea pigs for the great good of the socialist (communist) ideal as seen through the blurred vision of criminal minds. Minds like Dr Lothar Kipke's, member of the medical commissions of FINA and LEN and a man handed a criminal conviction in 1999, a decade after spending two decades sticking needles into underage girls one side of the Berlin Wall while thumping the tub of clean sport and quaffing alongside the Olympic ruling class the other side of it.

There can be no question that such things happened in China too in the 1990s. Human capacity for such criminality will always be with us, and not only in systematic form but in the guise of the Pygmalion coach or the athlete who convinces his or herself that the world is dancing to the tune of doping so why not stick the headphones on.

Australia knows all of this well. It has been a vociferous anti-doping campaigner and its swimmers are more tested than any in the world (the stats bear that out). It is also a nation that soaks up knowledge wherever it can find it: there is a small library of GDR papers penned by two of the highest organs of State Plan 14:25 sitting on a shelf somewhere not far from the AIS that invited criminals into its midst soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The invitation came with Australian Government permission and the idea was to 'know your enemy'. Seen from one angle, makes perfect sense. I would have wanted to know what they knew too. But imagine if China had done that. Imagine what we would have concluded. Imagine what might have become of such knowledge.

In such a complex world, and one where relatively vast financial rewards can be had from success in sport - including swimming - these days, much better that Hall Jr speaks as he finds when asked to do so than not. Phrases a cheat loves to hear include 'I couldn't possibly comment', 'best not to go there', 'I think he's a cheat but don't quote me on that', 'unless there's a positive test, we have to believe the sport is clean'.

No we don't. There was no positive test in Rome 1994 but we knew what was happening; there was no positive test in Atlanta but we knew that there was something brewing in the tale of an Irish triple champion; there was no positive from any GDR swimmer in those days, and not nearly enough was said in the open before a time when the proof was saved from the shredders.

Against that backdrop, Hall Jr does not deserve to be treated like a man who let a fox into the chicken coop. Rather he should be treated to some open replies from those who feel offended by his remarks. Let the light in for all to see what makes Sullivan so special. Hard work and injury free preparation are explanations that apply to vast swathes of sprinters around the world, including about 30 men who were ahead of Sullivan two years ago but now sit scratching their heads. The same applies to others who have entered a different league since Melbourne 2007.

I had the privilege to sit and scribble through the careers of Popov and Hall at their peak. There were big differences in the approaches taken by the two men and those who helped them along the way. There were some similarities too. And all through those years of battle between two towering talents they managed to race in a range just 0.21sec ahead of the 1986-1990 world of Biondi and Jager. There was always going to come a day when someone faster would come along. But the Beijing school of sprinters threatens to provide a podium that could improve standards in a two-year period by a margin that took more than 20 years to achieve in the years before its arrival.

If the alchemy of prospect into reality is achieved in Beijing, it will not be unreasonable to ask: how? The answer should not be delivered with a sigh and a whinge about how dreadful it is that great swims provoke suspicion. The line is tired. Just as prize money is part of the world of the modern swimmer and his entourage today so too is the need to answer every question put to you. It's part of the job. Michael Phelps and Bob Bowman do it all the time. The hundreds of articles on the Baltimore Bullet, every one stamped 'exclusive' when none deserve the label, are testimony to the relatively open-door policy of a team that knows you cannot go boldly where no man has gone before without someone asking: how? Sullivan, Bernard, Nystrand and others will face that question time and again between now and Beijing after making the journey from beyond 22 to inside it, in the Frenchman's case well inside, and in the Australian's case on the edge of another pool.

They should welcome the chance to share the natural wonders of their new world and the interest being shown in the nature of the preparation needed for a journey into a land beyond the giants of Jager, Biondi, Popov and Hall Jr.

Meanwhile, in the next phase of the doping war - and it may well be a bloody one - those in charge of anti-doping testing, including the likes of WADA and the IOC, need to spend less energy on boasting that 'all tests were negative' and more on open debate about the weakness of the testing regime that caught Marion Jones only when she wanted to be caught. Admitting the weakness is the first step towards getting stronger, and part of that process is the ability to debate such matters as those raised by Hall without fear of being clobbered with a Bushman's trumpet.

I leave you with the thoughts of two Americans who lived through the years of the GDR:

'The most important thing is that we continue to stand guard and develop an attitude of intolerance,' Mark Schubert, head coach to the USA and former coach to Shirley Babashoff, a swimmer robbed of what would surely have been a place among the big legends of the sport.

'In 1995 at the ASCA Clinic in New Orleans, I declared a need for a war on doping; I had only the faintest hope that that war would become FINA's war. At this Extraordinary Congress, President Mustapha Larfaoui called it FINA's War on Doping ... Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah.' John Leonard, President of the World Swimming Coaches, at the 1999 Extraordinary Congress of FINA called to tackle the China Crisis.