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When the difference between an Olympic medal and being left off the podium can boil down to hundredths of a second, every little detail matters on race day. Perfect execution, no unnecessary drag and, of course, a racing suit.
Tech suits, as they’re called, can impact everything from how swimmers move through the water to how they feel mentally preparing in the final minutes before taking their marks.
“The first time I put on a tech suit, I felt like Superman in the water,” said Ryan Murphy, now a three-time Olympian headed to Paris. “I felt like I was flying.”
Speedo is a global leader in developing tech suits for elite swimmers with the Olympics always front of mind. From the first non-wool swimsuit in 1928 to debuting its Fastskin suits at the 2000 Olympics, the 110-year-old innovative teams aim to push the boundaries of what’s possible in swimming.
Along with Speedo, TYR and Arena are also popular tech suit brands seen at elite competitions, including the Olympics.
“The performance is won and lost by the athlete,” Speedo senior vice president Simon Breckon told For The Win. “Our job is just to enable them on that journey.”
At the 2024 Paris Olympics, Speedo swimmers will race in two new tech suits: the Fastskin LZR Intent 2.0 and the Fastskin LZR Valor 2.0. Designed with input from elite swimmers and inspired by sharks (seriously!), athletes can pick the most comfortable — though still skin tight — and buoyant option, depending on their events. The more coverage of a suit, the more efficient it is.
“For me as a sprinter, I’m looking for compression,” said Abbey Weitzeil, a lifelong Speedo wearer who’s headed to her third Olympics.
“My favorite thing about it is that when I dive in — I wear the closed-back Intent — I feel like I have good body position, and it holds my body position and my body line.”
Speedo’s 2024 Olympics suits incorporate elements from sharks and space exploration
There’s a noticeable difference between a regular training suit and a tech suit. Murphy said in a tech suit, he glides further off the wall compared with his regular practice one, estimating it probably shaves about a second off his times for every 50 meters.
For Speedo’s tech suits, the goal is to reduce friction in the water and improve hydrodynamics. Teams of designers, scientists, materials experts, garment engineers and researchers want it to feel like a second skin, locking swimmers into a smoother shape and lifting them in the water.
Speedo actually does draw inspiration for textiles and design from one of the scarier sea creatures: sharks.
Led by Aqualab, the company’s central innovation team based in London, researchers examine how sharks and other creatures move through the water, said Coora Lavezzo, Speedo’s head of innovation. The Fastskin LZR Intent, for example, mimics sharks’ skin with optimized textured panels to maximize efficiency in the water.
“When you look at sharks, you notice that their scales, essentially — we call them denticles — they’re different across the body of the shark,” Lavezzo said. “So in some areas, they’ll be bigger. In some areas, they’ll be really small, and they’ll vary according to the curves of the shark. … We try and take that thinking and apply it to a person’s body.”
It’s not a new concept for Speedo, however. The first Fastskin suit that debuted at the 2000 Sydney Olympics was a full-body suit inspired by shark skin to reduce drag.
Speedo’s latest innovation for both the Intent and Valor suits is a “bespoke coating” inspired by protective coating developments for space exploration, Lavezzo said. She and her team poured through 50 of Lamoral Space Tech’s coating recipes to find the most water repellant one for the 2024 Olympic suits.
“When you see athletes splash themselves or you see them getting out of the water, they’re glistening because you see these water droplets kind of running off of them,” Lavezzo said. “And that’s really down to the water repellency that we use.”
But designers, researchers and engineers can’t work in a vacuum, so they enlist athletes early in the development process. They share designs, swatches and as many prototype suits as possible with swimmers and ask for feedback.
“It’s normally about how I feel [about] my body alignment in the water, or whether there’s too much compression or not enough,” Weitzeil said. “They’re always changing seams. They’re always changing fabrics and how to put those together. So if I feel like something’s not as compression-y in a certain spot, or if I feel like my body alignment’s falling out of place, I’ll tell them that for sure.”
The future of Speedo’s tech suits in a post-technical doping world
Innovation in tech suit designs can produce truly exceptional results. Famously, Michael Phelps won his record-breaking eight Olympic gold medals in 2008 in a LZR Racer suit. The suit included polyurethane panels, which were impossible for water to saturate, trapping air and leading to increased buoyancy.
The suit’s popularity exploded, and competitors tried to replicate it with neoprene, Breckon said.
But the “super suit era” caught the attention of World Aquatics, swimming’s international governing body, over concerns about them being akin to technical doping. So new rules were established, like no more full-body coverage and suits must be entirely made of fabric, no plastic or rubber panels.
Speedo works closely with World Aquatics to ensure new designs remain within the rules, Breckon said. But sometimes, there’s a little lobbying too.
“Technology now has kind of outpaced some of the guidelines in our sport, and we need to look at the balance of that,” he said.
Lavezzo and her Aqualab team have been working on suits for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics for about a year and are already looking ahead to the 2032 Brisbane Games.
Future developments could include suits tailored to varying body shapes or event- or stroke-specific suits, Lavezzo said. One already existing suit features power bands specifically to aid hamstrings when the power dynamics shift for backstroke.
Suits could also provide real-time biometric data to swimmers, but unlike many sports, that practice currently isn’t allowed in swimming. Perhaps Speedo can convince World Aquatics to move the goalposts.
“The layman’s example I give — which my innovation team laughs at — is basically the Black Panther, the suit that returns the energy,” Breckon said. “And how do you actually get the energy and put it back into the muscle groups? How do you isolate the muscle groups and drive power [where] it needs to be, depending on your stroke?”
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