Challenges and Controversies
David Barney
O Brave New World of Super Suits:
So Fast Even Phelps Didn’t Know the Water Was There
David Barney
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 20th Century tank suit fashion to the new Century. These suits were
called “Fastskins.” They made their debut in the dawn of the 21st 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 20th Century as well as the cumulative and then subsequent demise of the so-called
super-suits used in the past three Olympiads of this 21st 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
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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 20th
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 21st 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 1999. 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.
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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
O Brave New World of Super Suits
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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
2009. 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-
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David Barney
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, 2010. 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
If FINA’s ban needed immediate
redemption, the timing couldn’t have
Men
Women
Total
been better, since records began to
1996 Olympics, Atlanta: End of Pre Super-Suit Era ………………
fall like rain drops once the champi1 WR, 1 OR
0 WR, 1 OR 1 WR, 2 OR
onships began in Rome. Indeed, as I
2000 Olympics, Sydney: Fastskin I Era……………………………
mentioned a moment ago, by the time
6 WR, 5 OR
4
WR,
6OR
10
WR,
11
OR
th
the final event was put to rest, a grand
(Phelps no medals, 5 in Butterfly)
total of 43 new world records had
2004 Olympics, Athens: Fastskin II Era……………………………
been posted, and, possibly, some of
3 WR (all relay), 1 OR
(Phelps 6 golds, 1 bronze, 1 WR) 3 WR, 1 OR 6 WR, 2 OR
them in a kind of warped perpetuity at
2008 Olympics, Beijing: Panel-Polyurethane Era…………………
that, since it will probably take some
10 WR, 4 OR
time for many of those “enhanced”
9 WR, 4 OR
19 WR, 8 OR
(Phelps 8 golds, 7 WR)
r e c o r d s t o b e s u r p a s s e d . M a ny
2009 World Championships, Rome: Total Polyurethane Era……
coaches and swimmers of sound mind
22 WR (in
21 WR (in 23 events)
43
WR
and ethical perspective shared the
23 events)
thought that the suits should have
been banned long before the situation was ultimately resolved in the summer of 2009. 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.
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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?