After reading this article on the new LZR swimsuits worn at the Olympics, two things immediately pop into my head.
One: it’s fucking awesome that Speedo was faced with a conundrum and did the right thing by essentially opensourcing their new technology. Definitely a lesson to be learned here for other major companies, as they still ended up with the lion’s share of the publicity and, one would assume profits, even though they essentially gave their work notes away.
The company believes that the LZR is an equally profound invention — and the athletes who’ve raced in it tend to agree. As LZR-wearing swimmers instantly began to chalk up world records, word got around that anyone not competing in one at the Olympic Trials might end up “at home watching on NBC,” American coach Mark Schubert said.
Swimmers who were under contract to race in TYR, Nike, Arena, Mizuno, and others, were torn: support their sponsors or take the advantage offered by the LZR? Sensing bad PR, Speedo allowed the basics of the LZR to be copied; their rivals scrambled to create similar suits. In the end, most swimmers in Beijing competed in Speedo (although several countries, including Italy, wore Arena suits).
Two: this is the shit that superheroes would wear, albeit slightly more riddled with StarkTech or WayneTech upgrades.
I’d been warned that the suit takes 20 minutes to pull on, so I used the wetsuit trick of slipping plastic bags over my feet to make things easier. It did — to a point. It still took 10 minutes to get the thing over my legs, and three people to zip me up. The LZR’s fabric, Brommer had warned, isn’t soft like Lycra. Rather, it has a delicate, papery feel. And while the material is super-thin it takes effort to stretch it, as though it were far thicker elastic. The polyurethane panels act as a truss, which gives you the feeling of being hugged by the suit. Support=strength; think of weight lifters wearing their weight belts,
In short, you feel pretty badass in the LZR. That is no accident. When designing the suit, Speedo also probed swimmers’ psyches. “We asked them how they wanted to feel on the blocks,” Brommer says. “Michael Phelps said that he wanted to feel like Superman.” Did it work? “I feel better in the water than I have in any other suit,” Phelps says.
