Science has long played a role in sports, and swimming is no exception. In competitive swimming, a single millisecond can be the difference between winning gold or missing the podium entirely. While training, technique, nutrition, and talent remain essential, a surprising game changer that people don’t often think about is the actual swimsuit.
Those long, strange-looking swimsuits that you see on TV, also known as tech suits or fastskins, are high-performance swimsuits engineered using physics and advanced materials science. Designed specifically for competitive swimming, they reduce drag, compress muscles, and optimize body position in the water. They were so effective that at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, over 90% of swimming records at the time were broken with just one model of suit.
The technology was so dominant that regulations had to step in. One swimsuit had changed everything, pushing the limits of science and challenging the very integrity of the sport.
New speedo fastskin speedo.com
But how do they actually work?
Water is around 830 times denser than air, so as you can imagine, drag is a swimmer’s biggest enemy. That’s why tech suits are built to fight this resistance using smart design and powerful materials.
The fabric is typically made of a very tight blend of nylon and elastane, sometimes even reinforced with carbon fiber. This combination creates a lightweight but highly compressive layer that wraps around strategic muscle groups, improving posture and streamlining the swimmer’s body. Not only that, by compressing the muscles, it reduces vibration and can even delay fatigue by limiting lactic acid buildup. They are incredibly hard to put on! Much harder than you’d expect, tiny and non-stretchy, it often takes up to 25 minutes (and help from someone else) to get them on. Some suits feature an outer coating of silver or similar material to make them more hydrophobic, so they repel water rather than absorb it. That means less weight and less drag.
To take it even further, the seams aren’t stitched like normal clothes. They’re ultrasonically bonded, so there are no bumps messing up the water flow. As you can see, every little detail matters and is taken into account when making these suits.
As an interesting fact, some designs are even inspired by nature, such as shark skin, with microscopic structures called denticles that help guide water flow and reduce turbulence. Tech suits mimic this using microtextures and surface engineering, applying ideas straight from fluid dynamics and aerospace research.
However, the most controversial innovation was the use of polyurethane panels ,a lightweight, naturally water-repellent, and slightly buoyant rubber-like material (you’ve probably seen it as the foam inside sofa cushions or insulation panels in walls). These panels trapped pockets of air, improving the swimmer’s body position by helping with buoyancy and further reducing resistance in the water.
The suit that caused more controversy was the Speedo LZR Racer 2008 suit. Designed in collaboration with NASA, it reduced passive drag by up to 24% compared to a traditional swimsuit. The LZR Racer helped break most of the world records in just one season. So of course, many argued that this was very unfair, as it was no longer just about the swimmer but about the suit.
In response to the controversy, FINA (Swimming International Federation) introduced new regulations in 2010. From then on, swimsuits could no longer cover the neck or go past the shoulders or knees. They had to be made from textile fabrics, not polyurethane, and limits were also set on thickness and buoyancy.
As a competitive swimmer and materials science student, this is a very interesting subject to me and I really wanted to share. I’m sure you didn’t think there was so much behind a sport that seems to involve barely any equipment! Or at least not equipment that could make such a difference. Research is still ongoing but focusing more on the goggles and cap (as there are not many regulations on that yet). It makes you wonder: how fast can humans really swim, and how much of that will be thanks to technology? Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this post and learned something new.
Thanks for reading!
References:
NASA: Space-Age Swimsuit Reduces Drag, Breaks Records
https://www.nasa.gov/technology/tech-transfer-spinoffs/tech-today-space-age-swimsuit-reduces-drag-breaks-records/
Engineering.com: The Technology Behind Speedo’s High-Tech Swimsuits That Challenged the Olympics
https://www.engineering.com/story/the-technology-behind-speedos-high-tech-swimsuits-that-challenged-the-olympics
Wikipedia: High-Technology Swimwear
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-technology_swimwear
XtremeSwim Blog: How Swimming Tech Suits Work
https://xtremeswim.com/blogs/swim-blog/how-swimming-tech-suits-work
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