How Speedo developed this year's record breaking swimsuit

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How Speedo developed this year’s record breaking swimsuit

In the 2008 Beijing Olympics, many swimmers were wearing a full-torso polyurethane suits that compressed the body and increased buoyancy. That suit helped many swimmers break a number of world records, but it was a bit too good, and subsequently banned from international competition. So in 2009, Speedo had to start all over to create a suit in time for the 2012 games that would keep a competitive edge, while staying within the new international competition guidelines.

“Lots of conversation was had around wild and wacky ideas,” says Joe Santry, the research manager for Speedo’s Aqualab in Nottingham, England. “Some of the initial sketch concepts brought to the table looked like a superhero suit with a sleek cap, goggle, and suit combination that wouldn’t look out of place in a Marvel comic.”

They were trying to replace the now infamous full-body LZR suit. Dubbed “the rubber suit,” it compressed a swimmer’s body into a streamlined tube and trapped air, adding buoyancy and reducing drag. Speedo says 98 percent of the medals at the 2008 Olympics were won by swimmers wearing the LZR. Michael Phelps set world marks in seven of his eight events at Beijing wearing the suit, but applauded its ban.

The new rules, in effect since 2010, permit only “jammers,” suits from the kneecap to navel for men, and from the knee to shoulder for women. The fabric must be air permeable, and a suit may not have any fastening devices such as a zipper, a response to companies that began creating wetsuit-like neoprene suits after the 2008 Olympics.

Ultimately, Speedo decided to rebuild not only the suit, but create a “racing system” that it claims combines the suit and the goggles and cap working in synergy to reduce drag and improve performance.

At Aqualab, researchers took four years and spent 55,000 man-hours to produce what Speedo calls the Fastskin 3 system. The internal team of 19 supplemented by outside experts talked to hydrodynamic experts, aircraft engineers and nano textile producers. They called on experts in kinesiology, biomechanics, fluid dynamics and even a sports psychologist, who suggested a blue-gray tinge on goggle lenses to instill a sense of calm and focus. They tried the “Six Thinking Hats” method of brainstorming, a green hat for creative ways to attack a problem, a black one to look at the feasibility of those ideas. They “reverse brainstormed,” picturing how to make a swimmer go as slow as possible with oversized goggles and a suit compressing the body so parts stuck out, creating drag. The crazier the idea, the better.

“It opens up your mind,” Santry says. “We all have a strict path of how we get used to thinking. We used those techniques to pull out interesting facts and work around ideas.”

They scanned athletes in 3-D, creating avatars so computational fluid dynamics software could uncover where turbulence and drag were being created, similar to racing car teams that use aerodynamic modeling. “We found the head and goggles created huge amounts of turbulence at the top of the body, and this slowed down the swimmer and decreased the effect of the suit,” Santry says. “So much like a Formula 1 car, which has this wing that allows you to set up airflow, we realized we needed something like that for a swimmer.”