O Brave New World of Super Suits: So Fast Even Phelps Didn t Know the Water Was There

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Monica Porter
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1 Challenges and Controversies O Brave New World of Super Suits: So Fast Even Phelps Didn t Know the Water Was There Albuquerque Academy, U.S.A. The so-called full-body, high-tech, polyurethane-paneled, competitive swim suits made their initial international debut in August of 2008 at the Games of the XXIX Olympiad in Beijing, China. By the end of the following year, 2009, when the suits had evolved to a totally polyurethane design, they would be banned by practically every swimming body in the world, including, initially, FINA, and then shortly thereafter by almost all the international swimming federations. All in all, the ultra supersuits enjoyed just a little more than a mere year of existence. That s the long and the short of it. But the story goes much deeper than that. Before there were what we have come to call pure super-suits, there were plenty of precursors, suits that bridged the old world of 20 th Century tank suit fashion to the new Century. These suits were called Fastskins. They made their debut in the dawn of the 21 st Century at the Games of the XXVII Olympiad in Sydney, Australia. Few people in the swimming world would have ventured to predict then that the presence of the Fastskins would evolve to eventually change the character of competitive swimming attire in such a radical way that their very existence and subsequent universal use would involve the swimming world in such controversy. O Brave New World of Super-Suits examines the evolution of the fashion of competitive swim attire in the 20 th Century as well as the cumulative and then subsequent demise of the so-called super-suits used in the past three Olympiads of this 21 st Century. For more years than I care to remember, there came a moment in my less than sophisticated scholarly life, when I was able to free myself from the shackles of literary ignorance, however briefly I m ashamed to admit, and bury myself in the sociological curiosities of Aldous Huxley s quintessential dystopian novel Brave New World. That ancient moment aside, the recent phenomenon of high-tech fabric racing suits and their radical effect on swimming performance is reminiscent of some of the disturbing characteristics inherent in the horror of the optimum-engineering motifs of Huxley s satirical fiction. Huxley s scientific prophecies, it appears to me, provides us with a metaphor for what swimming performance might have evolved to had the swim suit manufacturers been given continued laboratory license to tinker further with fabrics enhancing the human body s capacity to perform, if you will, in the arena of artificial returns. But, of course, as we all know now, thankfully, that license was revoked by FINA a little over a year ago, in July of 2009, to be exact. FINA s fiat would bring to a close a decade of high-tech suit use and abuse, if you will. The most visible abuse had to 312

2 do with what many coaches considered to be an artificial or suspect decimation of records wherever records resided in the realm of competitive swimming. In short, when the suits were worn, records went tumbling down all over the planet. Most visible, of course, were all the World and Olympic records that lay awash and floundering in the wake of all those super-suit enhanced swims. For those of us old enough to remember something about the evolution of the fashion of competitive swim suits, we seemed initially only amused by the effect which the suits appeared to inflict on swimming performance. After all, we had been there before, we thought, coaching through a 20 th Century metamorphosis of materials from cotton, to wool, to silk, to nylon, to lycra, to polyester, and even to paper suits, each of which played a role in ushering us toward the dawn of the so-called super-suit era, which, coincidentally, coincided with the dawn of the 21 st Century. The prologue to the phenomenon of high-tech suit use began down under in Sydney, Australia, at the Games of the XXVII Olympiad in the year 2000, where the suggestion or prototype of the super-suits of today (perhaps we should say yesterday, now that the suits have been banned) made their debut after being declared legal by FINA in October of They were called Fastskins then, and the first ones were manufactured by Speedo. The Fastskins were full-length body suits which featured, over time, neck to nave to knee and then finally to ankle encasement. They were constructed of a knitted, biometric fabric designed to emulate the hydrodynamic character of shark skin. Indeed, the genesis of Speedo s initial advertizing thrust encouraged swimmers to swim like a fish and then later proclaimed with tongue in cheek perhaps, the water won t even know you re there. As it turned out, Speedo s pitch was certainly more than merely cute. Indeed, many swimmers, and especially world-class swimmers, recognized immediately a diminishment in the degree of difficulty encountered when moving through water. As coaches and competitive swimmers know all too well, an aquatic environment is anything but accommodating to a swimmer s progress through the various negative properties of water and especially turbulent water. The first of those negative properties is, of course, the density of water itself; the second is the turbulence induced by both a swimmer s mere presence as well as his or her subsequent movement in water; the third is water s reluctance to support high body buoyancy. The original Fastskin suits worn at Sydney in 2000 and then the Fastskin II s worn four years later at Athens addressed mostly the challenge of reducing drag only, whereas the polyeurathane-paneled suits worn in Beijing in 2008 and then, subsequently, the totally polyeurathane suits worn a year later at the 2009 World Championships in Rome, not only reduced friction drag to practically zero but significantly increased a swimmer s body buoyancy as well. The end result of all this, in a nutshell, was that the suits appeared to make mediocre swimmers good swimmers; good swimmers became really good swimmers; and great swimmers spent most of their time looking in the rear view mirror at all those world records they had just broken. A chemistry of cloth, then, as well as the applied physics of fashion, inherent in the design and manufacture of the super-suits, ultimately produced a product which, not only streamlined swimmers in much the same way that evolution has streamlined fish, but complemented their physiology as well. The end result of all this laboratory tinkering created a suit which not only reduced drag, but further enhanced the character of speed by compressing muscular efficiency, thereby reducing muscle oscillation, which in turn diminished fatigue potential. But most significantly, perhaps, the suits also radically increased a swimmer s buoyancy as well. The sum sample of this domino effect produced a racing suit which, in the eyes of some at least, raised suspicions relative to artificially induced performance. Indeed, steroids on hangers became a kind of joking metaphorical reference to the suits. But as the records continued to fall with such frequent rapidity, the joking gave way to alarm and then a sort of hysteria. By the summer of 2009 and the Rome World Championships travesty, mere mention of steroids on hangers had taken on a snide tone of voice in the enunciation-thesaurus of many swimmers, coaches, and journalists. 313

3 314 Beijing, the Beginning of the End The beginning of the end of the extreme super-suit era occurred in China in 2008, where we watched the Speedo polyurethane-paneled, LZR-clad Michael Phelps capture the planet in the palm of his hand at the Water Cube in Beijing. It was riveting theater, so riveting in fact that even though the suits were playing an important supporting role in the drama, they somehow took a temporary side-seat somewhere, in sight subtly but out of mind. Whereas the controversial use of the Fastskin suits at Sydney in 2000 and then the all new and improved Fastskin II s, at the 2004 Games in Athens alarmed many coaches, their concerns at that time took a rear seat to the more binding controversy of drug usage by swimmers as well as other athletes competing across the broad spectrum of Olympic events. However, four years later in Beijing, despite an avalanche of records, one could honestly say that the on-going controversy concerning the by-now almost universal use of high-tech suits became once again subordinate in the psyche of swimming aficionados, this time swept under the rug, so to speak, by the magnificence of the venue and the hysteria of human performance. Most of us, including a few of you in attendance here today, remember that hysteria as the The Phelps Phenomenon. In the echo of that hysteria, it was little wonder, then, that the continuing controversy of the suits would remain on FINA S back burner for yet another year. The Phelps Phenomenon Regarding The Phelps Phenomenon: really, one had to have been there truly to realize how totally absorbed the people of all nations were with Michael Phelps and his quest for eight gold medals and eight world records. The hype was extraordinary. Even early in the competition, it became graphically clear that Phelps did not merely belong to just Americans; he belonged to the planet and all of us earthlings collectively celebrated his performance. Even those tiring and redundant chants of USA! USA! became meaningless and muffled, then lost altogether in the thunderous acclaim accorded Phelps and each of his astounding feats. That phenomenon, by the way, was not limited to the Cube only. Giant flat-screen TV s, located seemingly everywhere in Beijing, as well as around the world, I might add, became gigantic magnets that not only drew the attention but held the fascination of a global population in a common, magnetized embrace. Whereas Usain Bolt may have had his day in the limelight at the Birds Nest, Phelps invoked his magnetism early on at the Water Cube, and held the world and the Games in his fist long after the Olympic flame had become redundant. Somewhere in the echo of all the Beijing Olympic swimming, though, remained the issue of the suits. Clearly, the genie was out of the bottle so far as their obvious enhancement of performance was concerned. As the reality of an astronomical nineteen new world records and eight new Olympic records began to set in, highlighted as they were by The Phelps Phenomenon, many coaches of firm mind and a degree of foresight rationalized, quite correctly, that if the super-suits of the Beijing Olympics could alter performance as much as they appeared to do, then to what degree might the ultra super-suits of tomorrow and then the day after that, affect performance? It did not take many tomorrows to discover an answer to the question. That being said, let s take a brief look at swimming performance post-beijing. The first of those tomorrows, now yesterdays to be exact, took place in College Station, Texas in March of 2009 at the USA NCAA Division I Men s National Championship Meet. Unlike the rest of the world, American College swimming is conducted in 25 yard short-course venues, a distance less than half the length of a long-course 50 meter Olympic pool. Many of us, including a few historians

4 O Brave New World of Super Suits 315 here today, I might add, have either viewed or even sat through numerous long-course championship swim meets, including even some Olympic competitions and, no doubt, we have collectively marveled over time at the ever accelerating back-and-forth pace of swimming performance, including, of course, the recent Beijing, and the even more recent than that, Rome record swims attained by swimmers encased in high-tech suits. But, when you place these same caliber world-class swimmers in a short course environment, speed becomes heightened; pace is magnified in the abbreviated space between dive and turn and finish. During the pre-super-suit era of NCAA swimming, especially, many of us probably felt like displaced faces in a spectator gallery watching a tennis match, our heads turning from side to side in that predictable, calibrated and choreographic rhythm of a metronome. Well, that analogy is no longer pertinent. Those of us who witnessed the 2009 NCAA Championship Meet in Texas, held only eight months post-beijing, became engaged in an all new experience in spectatorship. The pace of things had changed dramatically. There were no tennis balls flying back and forth at College Station, only ping pong balls it seemed. Instead of a swim meet, it was as if we were at the gold medal final of the table tennis competition in Beijing, with our eyes trying to follow the dazzling speed of all those little white balls being smashed back and forth over a tiny table. At the stylish Texas A&M natatorium, our heads swiveled from side-to-side like bobbleheads at what seemed like mach speed. Someone had turned up the metronome. Shades of Huxley! Could the tamperers have been Speedo, Tyr, BlueSeventy, Arena and Jaked? The alarming answer to that question, it appears to me, might possibly be found footnoted in the laboratory reports of Huxley s Brave New World, where the scientific notion of test tube determinism and chemically-driven position and performance prevailed. A Records Overview The orthodox and thus abbreviated-attire era of Olympic swimming ended in Atlanta at the 1996 Olympics, where only one world record and a mere three Olympic records were established. Four years later at the onset of the high-tech suit era in Sydney, men and women swimmers, clad mostly in Fastskins, generated 10 world records and 11 Olympic marks, none of which, by the way, concerned a fifteen year-old ignoramus named Michael Phelps, whose best showing was a distant fifth in the 200 Meter Butterfly. Phelps aside, that astonishing decimation of records became a precursor of what would eventually evolve to be an almost complete decimation of records, wherever they existed, over the next ten years and especially so during the last two years of the decade. The end of the road for super-suit Olympic swimming, at least, occurred in Beijing in 2008, where the polyeurathanepaneled suits like Speedo s LZR, for instance, cranked out 19 World and 8 Olympic records. By the time of the 2009 World Championships a year later at the Foro Italico in Rome, the polyeurathanpaneled suit had evolved to a rubberized, fully polyeurathane encasement which yielded a mindboggling 43 new world records in a singular championship meet. FINA S Ban The omnipresence of the super suits and their obvious influence on the astounding record breaking performances at Beijing in 2008, followed in short order by a steady stream of new swimming records around the world in the first half of 2009, led to an American-led initiative presented to the Technical Committee of swimming s international governing body (FINA) at the end of March of That initiative called for a banning of the suits in their current form and fashion. Subsequent discussions by the Technical Committee led to various proposals regarding the two major issues of concern: skin coverage and fabric content. The discussions were followed by an almost equal num-

5 316 ber of declarations and then retractions in the face of threatened law suits by some of the manufacturers. Finally, on July 23, as the World Championship Meet in Rome was about to begin, the Technical Committee advanced a proposal of fabric and body coverage limitations to the General Congress. A day later, at their annual meetings in Lausanne, Switzerland, the FINA Congress approved the limitations, to take effect on January 1, That date was later amended to October 1, 2009, following the almost farcical performance of record breaking swims in Rome. FINA s ban was framed by textile limitations, that must now meet specific fabric restrictions, which must in turn satisfy specific standards for buoyancy, permeability, and skin-coverage (neck to knee for women and nave to knee for men), as well as the glib character of retrospect, I might add. Table 1: For the Record Men Women Total 1996 Olympics, Atlanta: End of Pre Super-Suit Era 1 WR, 1 OR 0 WR, 1 OR 1 WR, 2 OR 2000 Olympics, Sydney: Fastskin I Era 6 WR, 5 OR (Phelps no medals, 5 th in Butterfly) 4 WR, 6OR 10 WR, 11 OR 2004 Olympics, Athens: Fastskin II Era 3 WR (all relay), 1 OR (Phelps 6 golds, 1 bronze, 1 WR) 3 WR, 1 OR 6 WR, 2 OR 2008 Olympics, Beijing: Panel-Polyurethane Era 10 WR, 4 OR (Phelps 8 golds, 7 WR) 9 WR, 4 OR 19 WR, 8 OR 2009 World Championships, Rome: Total Polyurethane Era 21 WR (in 23 events) 22 WR (in 23 events) 43 WR If FINA s ban needed immediate redemption, the timing couldn t have been better, since records began to fall like rain drops once the championships began in Rome. Indeed, as I mentioned a moment ago, by the time the final event was put to rest, a grand total of 43 new world records had been posted, and, possibly, some of them in a kind of warped perpetuity at that, since it will probably take some time for many of those enhanced records to be surpassed. Many coaches and swimmers of sound mind and ethical perspective shared the thought that the suits should have been banned long before the situation was ultimately resolved in the summer of Over time, many coaches continued to fault FINA for dragging their feet on the issue. Their primary argument chastised FINA for caving in to various swim suit manufacturers threats of law suits as well as the stand that they had millions of dollars invested in research technology and could ill afford to cease selling the highly profitable four and five-hundred dollar high-tech suits. Indeed, Speedo, for instance, was rescued from the edge of bankruptcy when they cornered the high-tech suit market initially with the Fastskins and ultimately with the Speedo LZR, the very first of the ultra super suits. Additionally, there lurked the manufacturers tacit threat of drastically reducing their significant financial support of international swimming if the suits were banned. Heady stuff for FINA to contemplate, because as we all know, if nothing else catches FINA s and their big daddy s, the IOC s attention, money does. In the end, however, mounting pressure from world coaches, as well as the perceived uncomfortable ethical implications of the issue, left FINA with little choice other than to swallow the olive, so to speak, and support the coach s initiative. The Slow-Down But all that happened more than a year ago. What has happened since the ban? Well, first of all, male performance has been more affected than female performance, primarily because of the difference in coverage restrictions. In short, women gave up only the coverage that affected the lower leg, while men gave up coverage that affected the most critical anatomical contribution to swimming performance, namely the torso.

6 O Brave New World of Super Suits 317 If you examine the results of the most recent USA NCAA Division I Men s Championship Meet held sans super-suits just a few short months ago in March of 2010 in the exquisite confines of Ohio State University s new super-fast aquatic facility, you will gain a fair understanding of the high-tech suits effect on swimming performance, or, in this particular case, lack of performance, if you will. Following the dictates of FINA s fiat, male racing suits, with their reduced skin coverage as well as fabric restrictions, appeared to resemble the jammer of more than a decade ago. The results were sobering, so far as record-breaking performance was concerned. Indeed, the entire program of events yielded (drum roll, please) nada, nil, zilch, zippo, and for the first time in over half a century, not a single NCAA record swim. That shocking scenario bears repeating: not a single record-breaking swim over a program of eighteen events, the very same program that had yielded eleven super-suitenhanced NCAA record swims a year earlier, and some of them by unknowns at that. Who are these guys? we had asked each other again and again at Texas A&M. Beijing aside, juxtaposing these two diametrically opposed college championship meet results accentuates, at least initially, the alarming effect that the super-suit window of opportunity imposed on swimming in general and championship swimming in particular. The End of Something A final and hypothetical thought, albeit a disturbing one: if the super-suits and especially the extreme or ultra super-suits had not been banned by FINA initially, and then by various national and international constituencies around the world, and if the experimentation, manufacture, and subsequent use of the super-suits had been allowed to continue unrestricted, what then? How long would it have been before someone would have ultimately turned or returned, as the case might be, to the remaining part of the equation to accelerate performance, namely, the swimmer? Dismissing, at least for the moment, the East German s scandalous attempt of yesteryear, the answer to that question might be, not very long at all, and especially so in a sport that for a time, at least, appeared to possess the potential to rival Mr. Huxley s laboratory in which a test tube environment begat a society born and bred to an eternity of predetermined position and performance. What then, indeed?

The LZR Racer Swim Suit

The LZR Racer Swim Suit Introduction The LZR (pronounced laser) Racer suit was the first suit of its kind meant for the world s elite competitive swimmers. It is also the first in the LZR line of swim