Making a Splash

Its creation began after the closing ceremonies in Athens. At the time, some experts suggested that the sharkskin design on Speedo's Fastskin suit was little more than a gimmick. After all, Spitz swam into history in tiny Speedos, without even a swim cap. A prominent doubter was Iowa State physiology professor Rick Sharp, a former collegiate swimmer, who wrote two papers questioning Speedo's performance claims. But rather than taking offense, Speedo was intrigued. "He was asking all the right questions," says Jason Rance, chief of Speedo's Aqualab global R&D center in England. So Rance called Sharp in 2004 to ask him to lead a team of outside experts to help build a better suit. "I laughed and said, 'Have you read my papers?' " recalls Sharp.

Speedo also enlisted NASA to do tests on drag-reducing fabrics. "We're just a bunch of nerds who don't swim," says NASA fluid-mechanics engineer Stephen Wilkinson. "This was new to us." In wind tunnels used to detect surface friction on spacecraft re-entering Earth's atmosphere, he tested scores of swimsuit swatches by blowing air across them at 63 miles per hour to simulate a swimmer as fast as Phelps. He found the fastest fabrics were coated with polyurethane, a slick, rubbery substance that slices through the water with less resistance than uncoated fabrics.

Speedo then began stitching together samples that Sharp tried out on Iowa State swimmers. Not everything went as planned. "We had one suit that looked great on paper," he says. "But then when we dove into the pool, it ballooned out like a parachute." The polyurethane panels, which act like a girdle to streamline swimmers, also proved problematic. "At first we put that girdle structure way up onto the rib cage," says Sharp. "But then we realized it restricted a swimmer's breathing."

It also wasn't so easy to wear. To prevent rips, Olympian Dara Torres found she had to "sit on the floor and inch it on like panty hose." Phelps's drawstring broke just before a race in May. Rattled, he quickly slipped into an old Speedo and promptly swam seven seconds slower than his world record in the 400-meter individual medley. His coach Bob Bowman says putting Phelps into a larger LZR solved the problem.

But despite the hype, there's one swimmer who's yet to set a record in a LZR: Michael Phelps. "The swimmer makes the suit, not the other way around," says Bowman. For Speedo, that means its success is not just riding on its high-tech Superman suit. It's also riding on the swimming superman wearing it.

© 2008