Make way for the aquatic Avatar heading for battle at London 2012 next summer after Speedo launched the latest cool and cutting-edge kit for Olympic swimmers, their contours, caps and peripheral vision honed, bonded and streamlined in a unison of 3D technology.
That's the image, the top line of claims, the outward manifestation of much energy, expertise, industry and fanfare from London to New York and Sydney in a sport that drew a much-needed line on January 1, 2010, one past which no shiny dark material shall pass.
Speedo's FastSkin3 Racing System, suit, cap and goggles combination, is the most streamlined in history, the boast goes for the heir to the FastSkin2 of 2007 and the latest product developed in a mission to maximise swimming efficiency, as opposed to exaggerate it in the realm of the artificial.
The bottom line past the facts, stats and sums of a FastSkin3 Racing System - suit, cap and goggles combination - that Speedo claims will be the most streamlined in history is simple enough: the kit looks great, swimmers says it is light, say they feel ready for the fight, confident in in trust and knowledge that they are wearing equipment built for purpose.
Many a techno reference to stuff like 3D head mapping, head-management system designed to make the cap fit better than it ever has; mention made too off the importance, according to psychologists, of the blue/slate grey lens (the colour of calm and confidence) of alien-eye goggles that play mood music to the athletic soul and racing spirit of swimmers about to do battle from their blocks.
The bottom line: the cap fits fantastically well, the goggles, striking in form and image, the most comfortable I have ever snapped on. Liam Tancock, world 50m backstroke champion on the line from a training camp in Florida, noted that he had pressed the goggles lightly into the socket of his eye and the kit had held, no need of a strap (they do come with a strap, of course). I tried it. It's true.
Confidence, trust, faith, were all words that fell from the mouths of the likes of Tancock and Britain teammates Rebecca Adlington and Fabio Scozzolli (ITA) in London, Michael Phelps (USA) in New York and a school of Dolphins Down Under. Tancock avoided the figures and stuck to the obvious appeal of so much kit worn by the best sportsmen and women in the world: "It's iconic."
He intends to don his Fastskin at a domestic meet next month (given that the Speedo of 2012 is now out and Olympic year looms, FINA's approved suits list - 2011 - still in focus is, perhaps, in need of a timely update), while Adlington may wait until Britain's Olympic trials next March "to savour it".
Based, like Speedo in Nottingham, and preparing to fire another quiver at swimming history at a home Games next summer, Adlington, fresh back from a month at Mission Viejo in California and looking lean and mean (if not menacing in her Avatar eyes), struck a practical note when pointing out the things she had looked when the testing was done and the FINA-approved suit was ready to roll: ease with which she can get into her suit through one of the armholes, the lightness of the apparel, which felt, she said, as comfortable on dry land as it does in water. "quote about shoulder pressure here."
Bill Furniss, coach to the Nottingham-based (like Speedo) Olympic 400m and 800m freestyle champion from Beijing and current world 800m champion, noted that a happy swimmer was one felt no sensation of water getting "into" the suit", no sense of dragging the heavy element with you, a sense instead of flowing through it.
From the lab and the PR office the message runs along the following sleek lines: if the latest all-textile suit is made of "3D zoned compression fabric" designed to "sculpt" a swimmer's body into hydrodynamic efficiency fit to make a seal wonder, with a pioneering anatomical marking system employed at fitting to show the swimmer how to align cap, goggles and suit to maximum effect, then 3D head-mapping technology (and hair-management system) is employed to make the cap fit better than ever before and alien-eye goggles that allow 180-degree peripheral vision are colour-coded to evoke the perfect psychological mood for racing. If worn together, the kit reduces passive drag by 16.6 per cent, while a swimmer's oxygen economy is improved by 11 per cent compared to Speedo’s previous products (banned suits excepted).
Cynicism is bound to be the companion of any such claims, even if they are correct and especially at a time when a suit is supposed to be, well … just a suit. While athletes under contract celebrate the claims for the kit that they will wear - and do so genuinely - there is a dilemma at the heart of any claims to improved performance: the gains made from hard and smart work.
The argument was at its most stark at the height of the shiny suits crisis: what it took swimmers such as Natalie Coughlin years to perfect with coaches Teri McKeever and Milt Nelms, the water whisperer, a suit could achieve overnight. Not quite the same thing today but as one source indicated in reaction to the Speedo launch, no swimmer who has engaged in and benefitted from the long-term benefits of applying sports science in training to achieve speed gains should have to wonder whether some of the advantage they have worked for might be whittled away because a suit can provide a rival with the kind of streamlined silhouette that only sweat should get you to. The events of 2008 and 2009 have made the swimming community more conscious of the fine line.
Prof Jan-Anders Manson and his team of FINA suit testers had their own parameters to consider and concluded that Speedo's bridge to the past and thread to the future is not designed to aid speed, buoyancy nor endurance. Speedo itself avoided such claims, the evolution of race swimwear has taken off where it left off in Melbourne 2007.
The Fastskin2 gives way to the Fastskin3 of 2012, the fit, cut and timing of events all bowing to the new rules and guidelines brought in when time was called on booster bodysuits made of non-textile materials that unquestionably took swimmers to places they could not get to without artificial aid.
Speedo having started suit wars in 2008 with its polyurethane-panelled LZR Racer, Sean Hastings, vice-president of Speedo product and marketing, confirmed that the new mission was "to make sure swimmers meet their maximum potential but not to exaggerate that" with artificial aids to performance.
Good then to see Rafa Munoz in the Speedo line-up in London, the Spaniard well shy right now of the pace he managed for the world 50m 'fly record that stands yet and may well do so for the rest of his career (and perhaps beyond) in the race pool. Clad in a red skit-on-Spiderman full body Jaked in 2009, Munoz looked bull-like in dimension, at odds with the sleek, athletic image of the swimmer. In jammers in London, Munoz looked honed, trimmed and slimmed down, athletic, ready to test himself in a sport reborn after a difficult journey that will surely have involved a degree of self-examination, reframing and then resolve.
A book of 41 out of 44 world records that remain the property of an alien sport that buoyed swimmers on a time warp to virtual speed that would be clicked and dragged into the trash can by 168 nations in 2009, serves as a constant reminder of the mistakes FINA made because it understood neither the sport it governed nor the properties of material it never questioned nor tested before flicking the switch. The mistakes continue, swimmers forced to stare at (some standards are so far in the future that to speak of incentive is insulting to the skill of the hunter) and aspire to (some standards are not beyond the scope of the current generation and may well serve to fast-track progress on the clock) times achieved in different conditions, the pillar of standardisation of the competitive environment, set to wobble for a while yet.
The shiny stuff, from LZR Racer to the full plastic fantastic of 2009, was given life to a large extent because of a mistaken belief that more money than ever before would pour into the pool as a result. The poison was overlooked - and the figures simply did not add up. The commercial potential in the kit of 2012 is much easier to see, despite the high cost of that part of the range aimed at those who might make it into the water at London 2012.
The equipment comes in three models, Super Elite, Elite and Pro, prices ranging from £430 for the combination aimed at the Olympic market to £25 for a pair of goggles that can be worn by any swimmer. The top price will be cited as costly by those used to paying much less for suits that cannot, by law, be part of any techno race to enhance performance (as argued and justified by makers of shiny suits now banned at the height of a kit crisis gone by). A splash of team colour will be added to the Olympic kit of nations wearing Speedo closer to the big event. Sport, leisure and fitness markets will take off in line with FINA requirements (all suits allowed next year must have won approval and be available for sale from January 1, 2012).
Speedo's final assessment of the success of its latest range lies ahead, pine of the most important questions raised by the company's Celia Muir: will swimmers give the Racing System a stamp of approval by wearing all three pieces together - and thus confirming that the symbiotic search for speed is not simply a sales pitch that fades with the lights of launch day.
