Professional swimmers have been getting themselves in a right tizzy recently over what to wear.

A second generation of high-tech body suits has sent swimming times tumbling less than a year after records were smashed at the Olympics by those wearing similar garments. Some think science has created a monster in these new polyurethane suits and the world’s governing body has just banned them.

British Olympic-medal winning swimmer Rebecca Adlington called the new suits “technological doping”. “Why would I wear a suit just to improve my performance,” said Adlington, who wears previous generation suit the Speedo LZR, which claims to be “4% faster in starts, sprints and turns”.

So what is the science of the suit?

MSNBC’s Cosmic Log has a nice analysis of the swimsuit wars to date, prominently featuring Iowa State University physiologist Rick Sharp:

“Basically, it’s a matter of having a garment on that will reduce the water resistance as much as possible,” Sharp explained.

Part of the challenge is the kind of material you use, and where you use it. The Speedo team came up with a design that put panels of polyurethane over parts of the body that produce the highest drag. Another part is the suit design: You don’t want a suit that traps water as it flows around the swimmer. Yet another innovation is to use material that squeezes and slims down swimmers “so the skin doesn’t wobble around as they go through the water,” Sharp said.

The new ban on full body suits and the use of polyurethane means sports scientists have to swim in a different direction though, and come up with textile based, shorter suits.

Joel Stager, director of the Counsilman Center for the Science of Swimming at Indiana University, says all this suit technology is bad news (press release):

There’s an overwhelming dissatisfaction by the swimming community that this is turning into an escalating technology war. Finally, the athletes are getting it into their heads that their efforts are being devalued. It’s not about who wins or loses, but what suit they’re wearing. It’s disappointing.

The LA Times opines a different view:

… short of a swimsuit fitted with motorized propellers, or high-jump shoes soled with rocket boosters, there’s little reason to reject improved design and materials based on skittishness about the records set and broken in seemingly less time than the 20 minutes it takes to don one of the new swimsuits.

…

The ancient Greeks ran barefoot — and naked, for that matter — in celebration of the human physique’s possibilities. In the era of high-tech sports, we recognize that although human athletic performance has limits, human ingenuity doesn’t.

One thing seems certain: by the time the next Olympics comes around we’ll have another set of scientifically designed suits and another row. Unless the athletes do go naked, which would probably bring even more interest to swimming events than arguments over suits.

Image: swimsuit technology in the 1920s / NOAA