It is, by all accounts, the fastest swimsuit the world has seen. Certainly, they had never seen anything like it at the swimming pool in North London into which I leapt wearing what might have looked, to the uninitiated, like an unfinished superhero costume (writes Will Pavia).
One fellow swimmer later confided that she usually played with her children in the section of the pool I had chosen to test this advance in aquatic technology. “Seeing you get in there I thought I had better avoid the area altogether,” she said.
Speedo had been cautious initially about the idea that I carry out the first public trial of their “fastest-ever” swimsuit, the Speedo LZR Racer, which was launched yesterday.
The company had not spent three years and millions of pounds developing an ultra light-weight, “low drag” fabric, tested by Nasa scientists, to have it evaluated by a man whose career peaked in 1987 after he gained his 1,500m badge from Haslemere Swimming Club. “Are you perhaps some sort of triathlete?” a company representative asked over the phone.
“Not as such,” I said. I do occasionally perform all three disciplines in a non-competitive environment, but I prefer it if there is a break of a few weeks between each one: a form of triathlon yet to be recognised by the International Olympic Committee.
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Eventually, nonetheless, Speedo consented. Hughes Duboscq, the Olympic 100m breaststroke bronze medallist, agreed to swim with me, and on Monday afternoon I arrived at the designated pool to attempt to break the world 50m freestyle record.
Tests in wind tunnels and flumes — artificial circulating water channels — have shown the suit to have 10 per cent less drag than Speedo’s 2004 swimsuit, and 5 per cent less than the suit introduced in the spring of last year, in which 21 world records have been broken. The tests do not reveal, however, the time it takes to get into the suit in the first place, nor the dispiriting process of finding your size in a genre of clothing designed around the bodies of 400 elite athletes.
In the changing room, Dave Newbury, from Speedo, said: “I can tell just by looking at you that you are an extra small.” Even in that size, he said my shoulders were too small and I had “no chest”. I felt like a fat lady in a couture house: none of it was made for me and, even if it was, my thighs would probably ruin everything.
Putting it on proved an excruciating process of wriggling, shuffling, pulling and grabbing, a business too indelicate to describe fully in a family newspaper. This is not the sort of costume one can step into under one’s towel on the beach, and afterwards, somehow, I felt more naked than before.
Only in the pool did it start to make any sense. Pushing off the wall, I felt as if I were sliding between layers of water: the suit is seamless and water-repellent and its sinews apparently compress an athlete’s body, and even to some extent my body, into a streamlined shape.
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Duboscq described the sensation with reference to his all-over shaving regime. “With this suit you have the feeling of having just shaved,” he said. He won our first race. He beat me again with his feet tied together and a weight strapped between his thighs.
Two elderly ladies in an adjacent lane looked on with mild interest. Pat Hopewell, from North London, who gave her age as “very old”, said: “It looks awfully impressive. Do you mind if I touch it?” Then she said: “I think it would be fine for ballet. We’re doing a ballet session after this.”
Sadly, as it was time for the suit to be returned, its ballet potential remained untested.
I had swum 50m in 37.4 seconds, nearly three seconds faster than my previous best, but still some distance from my ambition for the world record, currently 20.93 seconds.
Perhaps, I said to Mr Newbury, the problem was the temperature of the pool, or the lack of a proper competitive environment?
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Mr Newbury was typically unflinching in his assessment. “I think the main problem was your swimming,” he said. That, it seemed, was a problem even the world’s fastest suit could not cure.
The new suit costs £325 and will be available in shops in May.
The right kit and caboodle
— Fibreglass poles, which replaced bamboo in the 1960s, led pole vault records to soar by 2 ft (61 cm)
— A German horticulturalist invented a new double-strung tennis racket in 1977. The “spaghetti racket” allowed the player to spin the ball faster. It was banned after several obscure players won unexpected victories
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— At the 1991 World Championships in Tokyo, many commentators thought that the “chipless urethane surface featuring soft-landing and strong kick-back” was partly to credit for new world records in the long jump and 100m events
— Golf drivers with thin metal faces and spring-like effects were introduced to the PGA Tour in 1995. Average driving distances increased by 10 yards to 270 in the next five years. The arrival of the “solid-core” golf ball in 2001 apparently caused driving distances to stretch farther