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PARIS — The Olympic swimmers filter in hours before liftoff, and ready themselves for battle. One by one here at La Défense Arena, after vibing to music or sipping coffee or wolfing down a banana, they dip into water, push off a wall, and rehearse the finely tuned strokes that, by night’s end, will propel them to greatness. But first, around an hour before their race, they dry off and disappear, to fight an unseen “battle before the battle” … with their swimsuit.
The suits are their armor, their "built-in abs," as one industry veteran says; their "shield of support" as they glide toward Olympic medals.
The suits are also a nemesis, their opponent in what U.S. star Kate Douglass and co-authors call "a contorted wrestling match with the sharkskin garment."
In locker rooms, the swimmers struggle. For minutes, sometimes half an hour or more for women, they tug their uber-tight and inelastic suits up over bulging thighs and glutes. Occasionally, their knuckles bleed.
It’s “a Herculean task,” Douglass and co. wrote; but it’s a sacrifice that many Olympians are willing to make for suits that might help them drop a tenth of a second.
The suits compress their bodies. Specialized fabrics repel water and reduce drag. Most importantly, suit designers say, the compression stimulates muscles and supports proper swimming posture. “If you squeeze the body, you make yourself more streamlined through the water,” Greg Steyger, the director of innovation and design at swimwear company Arena, explained to Yahoo Sports. And “more streamlined” means faster.
The compression, though, comes with a price — beyond the $600 that some “tech suits” cost. Multiple former swimmers who spoke with Yahoo Sports recall needing 40-plus minutes to put suits on. In and around the sport, the past two decades have produced horror stories and even tears.
The pain pushed manufacturers to address this largely hidden problem. They now produce a range of suits that exist on a continuum from compression to flexibility and comfort. Some elite swimmers lean toward the latter.
"I don't really like mine too tight," U.S. Olympian Olivia Smoliga said. "If [it takes] over 10 minutes, I'm not wearing that one."
Distance swimmers especially tend to prefer a more relaxed fit. Katie Ledecky, for example, “doesn't like a ton of compression on her legs, so she actually wears a different suit” than the ones most sprinters wear, according to Rachel Ripley, director of merchandising at TYR Sport, which sponsors and outfits Ledecky.
Others, though, wilfully engage in the wrestling match. Alex Walsh, a U.S. Olympian who races in a middle-ground Arena suit called the Glide, told Yahoo Sports that a fresh one “takes me about 15 minutes to put on.” Other women — and even some men — take longer.
An already-worn Glide, Walsh said, takes only five minutes. But at major meets like Olympic trials, or the Games themselves, she — like many top swimmers — will discard a suit after one race. They’ll reach for new armor every night, and submit to minutes of suffering, because a new suit is most potent.
Comfort is secondary to speed
Back in the day, for almost all of the 20th century, suits were just swimsuits; and like any Average Joe, Olympians could slip them on in seconds. Men wore tiny briefs. Women raced in what would now be considered a training suit — or, simply, a stretchy one-piece bathing suit.
“You just chose suits for comfort and style,” Therese Alshammar, a six-time Olympian (1996-2016), says.
That changed around the turn of the century. Manufacturers weaponized materials that were more hydrodynamic than human skin. Suddenly, medal contenders began arriving at Olympics armed with full-body suits — which first stretched from knee to neck, and eventually from ankle to neck to wrist, covering everything except feet, hands and head.
By 2008, the “supersuits” featured rubbery coatings and artificial core stabilizers. They made swimmers feel “buoyant,” because the materials were lighter than water. They were clearly performance-enhancing.
Unfortunately, “they were super uncomfortable,” Alshammar says. And “it took like 30, 40 minutes [to put them on]. It was terrible.”
“It was brutal,” says Dara Torres, who won Olympic medals in the 1980s and 90s, then came back for more in 2000 and 2008.
Alshammar remembers thinking: "I'd rather swim in my old PJs than this."
But she also felt like she had no choice. Supersuit-wearers were shattering personal bests. World records were dropping like flies. Comfort became “secondary to speed,” she says, “because it [was] such an advantage.”
It was such an advantage that, in 2009, swimming’s global governing body — then called FINA, now renamed World Aquatics — decided to regulate suits. Several performance-enhancing features were banned. Polyurethane fabrics are now outlawed, as are full-body suits. Men are limited to hip-to-knee “jammers”; women can’t go below the knee or past the shoulder.
The concept of compression, though, endured — and so, therefore, did the wrestling matches.
A suit half the size of the body
The suits, in their unworn resting state, are roughly half the size of the body they’re supposed to cover. Try to pull one on like you would a normal pair of shorts, and a grippy ring meant for the bottom of the thigh will probably catch on your ankle; the entire thing will get stuck at your knee or calf.
The material is alarmingly inflexible. Swimmers roll and tug it up their legs, inch by inch, preferably while sitting down. It’s a taxing process, but the worst thing to do is rush through it — and sweat, which makes it even more difficult; or exhaust oneself before an Olympic final.
Torres, a decade ago, had a solution. She would walk around with squeeze balls and hand grips, working her forearms and finger strength in spare time.
Many swimmers also began wearing gloves, because wrestling the suit with bare hands can make knuckles bleed.
Men, of course, have it relatively easy. For women, the vexing challenge is pulling the top of the suit — which is designed to compress their chest — over their hips. Some call for help from a peer. Some get stuck if they hit what Ripley calls a “bonded seam” — the combination of glue, heat and pressure that fuses the suit’s fabric panels together. Those, she says, “don’t stretch.”
They can also rip. Ripping is rare nowadays, the suit manufacturers say, but not unheard of. Many swimmers will arrive at a meet with more race suits than possible races, “just in case,” Ripley says.
A similar malfunction haunted Alshammar in 2008, when she entered the Olympics as a medal favorite. In the ready room before a 50-meter freestyle semifinal, she felt her suit's zipper split in two. "Oh, s***," she thought.
She tapped Torres on the shoulder. They eventually tapped in reps from Speedo to force the suit back together, while Torres pleaded with officials to delay the race. Alshammar ultimately made it to her starting block, and the suit stayed intact. But, flustered, she “swam a pretty crap time,” missed the final, and “was super distraught.”
Nowadays, zippers are gone. Technical changes have expedited the process — for some, to some degree. Arena advertises its new suit, the Primo, made with a "tensoelastic fabric" called "Hyperforce," as "a high-compression suit that goes on in under 5 minutes."
But still, according to a variety of people in and around swimming, the average suit takes roughly 15-20 minutes to get on — “which is a lot if you're trying to get ready for your race,” Torres points out. “The last thing you want to do is worry about a swimsuit.”
Are the suits worth it?
The horror stories, naturally, beg the question: Are the suits more harmful than beneficial?
Nobody has ever quantified their impact. Even those who make and sell them admit that, at most, the difference between a compressive suit and non-compressive suit is tenths of a second in a 100-meter race.
Tenths of a second, however, “sounds like nothing, but it is something,” says Mark Pinger, a former Olympic swimmer and now Arena’s U.S. general manager. “You are three tenths of a second slower, that is a big deal.”
And even if you aren’t three tenths slower, the mere thought that you might be is pertinent.
“A lot of our sport is just mental,” U.S. Olympian Hunter Armstrong said. “It’s just about feeling good in the water.”
Pinger likened the suits, in this respect, to the longstanding custom of shaving body hair before a big meet.
“You can say, ‘c’mon, is that really making a big difference?’ But it's making a huge difference mentally,” he argues. “The sensation when you dive in the water, you're like an oily kind of thing that just glides through it, you're very slippery. You just feel amazing.”
The suits, of course, require more discomfort and inconvenience than a shave. They're also controversial further downstream, at younger ages, because they cost hundreds of dollars — dollars that rich families can () pay but most parents of 12-year-olds can't (or don't).
At the Olympic level, though, they’re unquestioned. The tenths, or even hundredths, can be worth millions of dollars.
The 15-20 minutes of wrestling, or more, therefore, are “worth it,” Ripley says. “Usually.”
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