If the progression of records resumes its average rate after the ban on polyurethane suits, many of these won’t fall for another five or ten years. This, then, is the magnitude of the swimsuits’ effects a one percent drop in time may mean only one or two seconds, but that can be the difference between a very good race and a world record time.
Overall, the world records fell by, on average, 1.06 percent in excess of the average rate during the two-year polyurethane reign, which I believe to be mostly attributable to the change in equipment. It’s surprising that any equipment, outside of a speedboat, could allow someone to better Thorpe’s time. At this distance, the Thorpedo was a Speedo LZR unto himself, carving 3.7 seconds (1.7 percent) off the world record time between 19, during which he broke his own world record four separate times.
This last example says less about the effects of the swimsuit than it does about the greatness of Australian swimmer Ian Thorpe, the previous world record holder in the 400m. One way to separate the effects of the polyurethane suits, then, is to compare the rate at which world records fell in 2008-09 to the average up to that time for each event.Īs shown by the table, world record times for most of the events fell at a rate about two to five times greater than the average, with the exception of the 400m, which was curiously immune to the effects of the polyurethane suits. Since 1962, all five world records dropped at between 0.26 and 0.36 percent per year, which I treated as the baseline rate at which all swimming times improve, due to average advances in technique, athletic development, pool design, etc. The rate at which the world record times fell was remarkably consistent across the five events. As an example, here’s the world record progression for the last 20 years of the 200m, which is pretty typical of the general trend. I focused on the freestyle, a stroke that has remained mostly consistent stylistically over this time span, in five different distances: the 50m, 100m, 200m, 400m, and 800m. To start, I examined the progression of world record times in men’s swimming from the last 50 years-a more modern era of swimming, which includes the introduction of the flip turn and half body suits for men-and looked at how frequently, and by how much, world records fell over time. So just how much did they contribute to the swimmers’ successes over this two-year period? I set out to find the answer by isolating the effects of the suit and analyzing the distortions they created on record swimming times. The results of the suits still stand, however, in the world records they produced. Finally, in January 2010, the international swimming federation FINA prohibited the wearing of non-textile suits like the LZR and its successor, the Arena X-Glide, in competition. A combined 140 world records fell at the hands of swimmers wearing the new suits between February 2008 and July 2009. With a life span of only a dozen races and a small army of assistants needed to even put it on, the suit certainly didn’t seem like just a piece of clothing, and the performance it generated in the pool reinforced that impression. The space-age, NASA wind tunnel-tested garment increased buoyancy and allowed its wearer to glide through the water with significantly diminished drag. Of course, the asterisk with which those events will be tagged by history was the technology: the polyurethane Speedo LZR Racer suit. Who could forget Michael Phelps out-touching Mil orad Cavic by 0.01 seconds in the 100m butterfly, or Jason Lezak’s heroic charge in the 4x100m freestyle relay to overtake France’s Alain Bernard and keep Phelps’ pursuit of eight gold medals alive?
The 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing were remarkable for many reasons-the opening ceremonies, the human rights controversies, the Redeem Team-but the signature moments many Americans will remember came in the Water Cube, during the swimming events.
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