The Great Swimsuit Debate

Image from Speedo

I have written before about the role that technology plays in different sports. Some sports, such as running, have a low potential for technological performance increases, and on the other end of the spectrum sports like Formula 1 have a  high potential for technological performance increases. Until a few years ago, the sport of swimming was probably in the former category. Given that flippers were banned, there was only so much improvement that could be gained through goggle selection, etc... or so it seemed to me. But it turns out I was wrong, as controversy has surrounded every recent major swimming event due to the use of high tech swim suits.

The journey towards the high-tech swimsuits that we see today began in the 1990s, when Speedo released the S2000 (claiming 15% less drag than conventional fabrics) and the Aquablade (claiming 8% lower surface resistance than the S2000). Several iterations followed, and the designs  moved away from "traditional" style swimwear to suits covering as much of the body as possible, taking inspiration from nature (e.g. skark skin) to increase swimmers' hydrodynamic efficiency.

The real controversy began shortly before the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, when Speedo released a new swimsuit, designed in collaboration with NASA and the AIS (Australian Institute of Sport). The new fabric mimicked shark skin to reduce drag, and the suit also acted to squash the swimmer's  body into a more hydrodynamic shape, and possibly also increasing boyancy by trapping air. The compression of the suit also allowed similar efects to compression garments, apparently allowing greater oxygen flow to muscles and decreasing fatigue.

Since the introduction of the first "high-tech" swimsuit, the Speedo LZR, 19 out of the 20 men's world records and 19 out of the 20 women's world records have been broken. Obviously not all of these records can simply be attirubuted to the new suits, world records do eventually get broken even without major new technologies, and there are other relevant technological factors such as improved swimming pool technology and improved training, recovery and nutrition practices.

But the rate at which records have fallen recently is unusual (e.g. 5 times more records fell during the 2008 Beijing Olympics year compared to the 2004 Athens Olympics year), and potentially undesirable. Scientific studies have indicated that the best swimsuits can yield a X% drag reduction, corresponding to a X% performance increase compared to "traditional" swimwear.

The international governing body for swimming, FINA, approved the Speedo suits for use at the 2008 Olympics. The Olympics requires that all new technology be available ahead of the games for any athlete to use. In practice the high-tech swimsuits are not available to just anyone; manufacturing runs are limited to quantities sufficient only for a handful of the world's elite.

So what should the rules regarding swimsuit technology be? Should FINA have acted differently ahead of the 2008 Games?

The way I see it, this topic can be argued from two directions: first, that the sport of swimming be regulated so that the role that technology plays is kept to an absolute minimum, and second that any technology is acceptable, provided that it doesn't create an advantage for one athlete over another (i.e. it is truly available to all competitors).

Arguments in defence of the first approach tend to relate to the desire to be able to compare athletes and records throughout history in a meaningful way. You might also say that it is a question of whether it is swimmers competing or swimsuit manufacturers. There is a valid point to all this, of course, and it is certainly desirable to maintain swimming's focus on human physical performance. But an extreme version of this stance that advocates banning all technology from swimming is naive. One reason for this is that the public seems to demand that records be broken. If sport technology remained exactly the same, then the rate at which records were broken would decrease over time. If this were to occur, then there is a risk that swimming would become less popular with the public, and everyone knows that popularity equals money. Another reason for rejecting an extreme anti-technology stance is the fact that it would be impossible to achieve this. Even if swimmers wore cotton bloomers instead of polyurethane streamlined suits, even if you went even further and banned any sort of swimming pool technological advances, there are always going to be improvements in training methods, in nutrition and recovery, and any number of other effects of a technologically advancing world.  I believe that swimming, as with every other sport, needs to focus not on eliminating technology, but rather on sensible regulation.

So onto the second take on the argument, that so long as everyone has access to the new technology, there is nothing wrong with it. There is a certain truth in this argument as well. If everyone truly did have access to the technology, there wouldn't be anything inherently uncompetitive about the new suits. As swimmer Jessicah Schipper stated: "we were all there, doing the same job in the same suit" (from ABC) about the 2009 world championships in Rome. In fact many of the swimmers who disapprove of the use of the high-tech suits state the lengthy struggle to get into them as a main factor for their opposition. Some others seem more concerned about their sponsorship contracts with non-cutting-edge swimsuit manufacturers than about the effect of the suits on their sport's integrity. An example of this is Phelps. While some swimmers in recent competitions wore suits from rival companies to their sponsors with the logos covered (e.g. Mary De Scenza), an exception to this was Micahel Phelps, who continued to wear the supposedly sub-standard Speedo suit. He had what could be described as a little bit of a public hissy fit, however, following his defeat in the 200m Freestyle by German Paul Biederman who was wearing one of the cutting edge Arena X-Glide suits. His coach threatened that Phelps would boycott international competition until the offending swimsuits were banned. I doubt if I am the only one that this outburst seemed a little hypocritical to, given that Phelps was happy enough when his sponsor's (Speedo) swimsuit was state-of-the-art a year earlier. It seems to me that his problem is not an ideological one so much as a financial one... maybe he should have thought twice before signing up with a swimsuit manufacturer who couldn't guarantee him use of the best equipment.

Jaked Swimsuit

So, if we consider that technological advances are ok as long as they're available to everyone, does that mean that anything goes? As in other sports, the technology debate is a bit of a slippery slope. Ok, so shark-skin suits might be acceptable, but probably not flippers. Dietry supplements but not drugs. Etc, etc.

To me, the surprising thing about the swimsuit controversy is that swimming has typically been a relatively strictly-regulated and low-tech sport. FINA have been pretty quick to regulate innovation in swimming style (e.g. limits to how long you can stay underwater, and butterfly was orginally invented as a faster alternative to breastroke, but then differentiated into a separate discipline). Currently, FINA regulates swimsuits according to "rules regarding shape, use of only one swimsuit and no taping" (FINA.) But the rules are set to change in early 2010 to ban air-tight fabrics that trap air (and increase boyancy), and also suits that don't "follow the body shape" (which I interpret to mean no compression garments). These advances seem to be pretty universally approved of by the swimming community. More controversial is the new regulation that men's suits can't go past the knee or navel, and women's past the knee or onto the neck or shoulders.

 I think that these new regulations are sensible, but I also wonder why they didn't exist before the sudden technological leaps of 21st century swimming. For example, wetsuits weren't ever allowed, because they increase boyancy, but suits that trap air to increase boyancy were? I haven't been able to locate the exact regulation that bans wetsuits (ok, I didn't try all that hard...), but it must have been badly worded if a different mecahnism that achieves the same outcome (increased boyancy) is allowed. This is an issue that I have with sports tech regulations across many sports: they are too often reactive in nature, to a very specific technology that is decided after implementation to be undesirable. As I've said before (and will definitely say again), what is needed by each sport is a type of "mission statement" of the sport's nature and pupose. From this could follow blanket statements regulating technology, including ones that haven't been invented yet. For example, swimming could have made a rule that no external device may increase the mechanical efficiency of the human body. This would mean no flippers, boyancy aids, inserts in suits that enhance streamlining, etc. Obviously at times there will be technological advances whose effects may not have been easily foreseeable, and regulations may have to be modified or added. But my point is, that this should not be a matter of banning a particular product, but of categorising which modes of technological advancement are desirable according to the "mission statement" and which are not.