The Sharkskin Surge

Date: 2000–2010 | Location: Speedo research lab, Nottingham, England; NASA Langley Research Center, Virginia; Beijing; Rome

Stakes: Whether the swimmer or the suit was winning the race

The Glitch: The Rulebook Never Imagined the Swimsuit Itself Could Be the Fastest Thing in the Pool

THE SET UP

By 2008, NASA had helped build a swimsuit fast enough to get itself grounded. The suit's development began when a young scientist, Fiona Fairhurst, had a flash of inspiration.

Fiona Fairhurst grew up racing competitively. She knew swimming was a sport measured in hundredths of a second. She later became a textile scientist at Speedo, charged with chasing the sport's oldest assumption: the smoother and slicker a suit felt, the faster a swimmer went. Suits kept getting tighter and shinier, chasing the idea of a second skin.

Before she found her answer, Fairhurst studied race cars, took up scuba diving, evaluated marlins, cheetahs, and even penguins. None of it was the answer. She started thinking about other strong swimmers. A shark expert at London's Natural History Museum told her something odd: sharks shouldn't be as fast as they are. Their shape and density would suggest a far slower swim velocity. They are fast anyway. A fascinated Fiona inspected sharkskin under a microscope.

Sharkskin isn't smooth at all; it is covered in thousands of tiny, ridged scales called dermal denticles. Water dragging along a completely smooth surface forms microscopic swirling vortices that act like brakes, increasing drag. A shark's ridges, however, channel the water and break those vortices apart before they can fully form.

Slick wasn't the answer. Texture was.

Fairhurst's team copied the ridges into a fabric and called it "Fastskin." It debuted at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. A staggering eighty-three percent of medalists wore the suit.

Fairhurst stayed on for what came next. After 2004, Speedo's Aqualab brought NASA into the project. Researchers tested more than sixty fabrics in wind tunnels built for spacecraft, and discovered that sewn seams created drag, so Speedo welded the panels together instead of sewing them, and bonded in a zipper thin enough to disappear. They also added something Fairhurst's original fabric never had: panels of polyurethane, stitched in not to cut drag but to compress the muscles underneath and keep them from wasting energy.

The result, released in 2008, was the LZR Racer — Fairhurst's shark-skin fabric on some panels, the new compression panels on others. Nothing in swimming's rulebook said a suit couldn't be engineered like an airplane wing crossed with a shark.

THE GLITCH

As we look at cases in the Upgrade category, we always ask the same question: does a sport get better once everybody starts copying an idea? For two years, swimming didn't have an answer.

Speedo claimed the LZR Racer had won roughly ninety-one of the one hundred and two swimming medals up for grabs at the Beijing Games.

A statistic like that does not go ignored. Arena and Jaked started building their own versions, but not by chasing Fairhurst's patented denticles. They went back to the "second skin" idea her research had already shown didn't work. Their suits were nearly seamless polyurethane, slick and compressive, buoyant enough to make swimmers float higher in the water, worn head to toe. Within a year, Speedo's own record-breaker was the slow suit on the rack.

At the 2009 World Championships in Rome, a meet swimmers still call "The Plastic Games," forty-three world records fell in eight days. Michael Phelps, swimming in the very suit that had made him a legend the year before, lost to Germany's Paul Biedermann, who wore a newer, all-polyurethane suit.

That was the real problem. A sport built around a single question, "who is the fastest human in the water?" suddenly had a second variable: who has the best suit technology? Nobody was cheating; everything was technically legal. But it became undeniably clear: the engineering of the suit mattered more than the engine of the swimmer.

THE FIX

Weeks after the Plastic Games, swimming's governing body, ruled almost unanimously that technology, not ability, was setting the pace. Starting in 2010, suits could be made of woven textile only, no polyurethane, with strict limits on coverage. The suits that had rewritten the record book less than two years earlier were banned outright.

The ban went into effect in 2010, but the records set in 2009 were allowed to stand. FINA never erased those records. More than fifteen years later, a handful of those polyurethane times remain entirely unbroken; impossible targets set by suits nobody is allowed to wear.

Interestingly, Fairhurst's original shark-skin fabric is still legal today, and still found in Speedo's newest suits.

In 2009, Fiona Fairhurst was named as one of three finalists for Inventor of the Year by the European Patent Office. Past finalists were typically automotive, heavy machinery, or biomedical engineers; not sportswear designers.

RULEMAKER'S DILEMMA: When a piece of equipment becomes part of the competition, who's actually racing, the athlete or the equipment? Swimming's answer was the athlete. Swimming chose the swimmer. The record book is still catching up to the suit.