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Time Magazine
High-Tech Swimsuits: Winning Medals Too
August 13, 2008

Swimming in the Tracer I noticed the compression in my legs was greater than with any other suit I've worn. It made me feel explosive and helped me kick effectively. The suit felt light, like I was swimming in saltwater, and although it wasn't the most comfortable thing in the world — it took 20 minutes to get into — it was fast.

For this Olympics, TYR had to alter its design focus. Four years ago, the company had developed a suit called the Aqua Shift, using a technology borrowed from airplanes and Formula One car racing, but never before used on a swimsuit. It used a system of turbulators, or tripwires, that wrap around the chest and back and disrupt, or trip, the flow of water down the body. This was significant because in previous attempts to reduce drag, the water would run quickly down the body and then form an eddy that would literally pull the swimmer backwards. So, in effect, the turbulators reduced total drag by increasing (slightly) the amount of friction on the surface of the body.

And the Aqua Shift worked well. Too well, in fact. After the 2004 Olympics the governing body for international swimming, FINA, decided that tripwire technology was too extreme and, according to TYR, banned any form of protuberances from swimsuits.

After having battled with FINA over this and other technologies, the TYR team decided to take a more holistic approach to the suit for 2008. While it spent plenty of time in the lab developing fabric and design structure, TYR focused most of its efforts on the swimmers and in the pool. Eric Shanteau, a member of the American Olympic team, swam seven personal best times at trials in a suit that he helped design. (Yes, he's the guy who went to Beijing despite a diagnosis of testicular cancer.) Shanteau, for example, had about an inch and a half of material taken out of the waistband part of the suit to make it cling more precisely on his body. "That really helped the fitting for me," he says. That modification was eventually incorporated in the standard model which is being used by many of TYR's 200 sponsored athletes; others opted for custom-fit suits, an option that was offered to all.

You can wear the LZR or TYR and feel as fast as a dolphin — and don't discount the psychological effect of wearing something high tech.