In most sports, quivering over uniform designs usually has more to do with marketing than performance (it’s just a coincidence that the Tampa Bay Buc’s lost their first 22 games wearing these uniforms, right?). But in the world of swimming, new suit technology can lead to huge time drops, as was evidenced by 43 world records being broken at the recent World Championships in Rome, with all but a handful of these being in the new, shoulders-to-ankles polyurethane suits. (Read the recap and watch the video of the Phelps-Cavic 100 butterfly race where the non-poly suit won)

The general feeling in the swimming community, among swimmers and coaches, is that the suits are bad for swimming. It creates too much of a gap between those who can afford the suits and those who can’t, causes swimmers to have to be disloyal to their sponsors, taints history, and muddles the water about who is the better swimmer and who has a better suit.

FINA, swimming’s international governing body, has backed a proposal by USA Swimming to ban the new suits beginning in 2010. The new rules state that all suits must be made of a woven textile material (although does not clarify these terms) and must be waist-to-knees or shorter for men, and cannot cover the neck or shoulder, nor extend past the knees for women.

So how do the new polyurethane suits work, and how effective are they really?

Polyurethane is by no means a new substance, (it was invented in the 1930’s) and has many industrial and commercial uses. Its application in swimsuits, however, is a new fad. It first cropped up in the Speedo LZR suits, but was only a complementary material. After the success of the LZRs at the Beijing Olympics, many suit companies decided to make suits entirely out of polyurethane, and it worked splendidly. All of the major suit manufacturers developed these suits, yet in a stunning move, suits by some manufacturers (namely the major companies in the United States companies, TYR and Speedo) were inexplicably banned while other, comparable suits (such as Italy’s Jaked, Arena, and Adidas) were approved. There have been rumors of back-room dealing between FINA and certain suit manufacturers, but that is another story for another time.

The way the polyurethane works is that the suits are basically made up of closed-cell polyurethane foam and each of these tiny cells are filled with gas that is less dense than water. This lower density allows the swimmers to float higher in the water, and since water provides 780 times the resistance of air, it can be seen why having more of your body out of the water would make such a huge difference in times. The suits also help strengthen the core muscles, and prevent muscle fatigue, thus giving an additional advantage to more muscular swimmers. Studies have put the time drop caused by these suits as high as 5%, which equates to 3 seconds in a 1 minute race.

Beginning in 2010, FINA will ban the suits at the approval of all but 7 of their member federations. Michael Phelps, who chose to stay loyal to sponsor Speedo, and his coach Bob Bowman have spoken out against the suits. There is some controversy over these statements, because when Speedo was making the fastest suits in the world (the partially polyurethane LZR’s) Phelps did not have any complaints.

FINA has decided to allow all records set with these new suits to stand, but now there is a push to asterisk records set with the modern suits, led by US National team coach Mark Schubert (who was also a cheerleader for the Speedo LZR). The NCAA has already announced that at the 2009-2010 national championships, they will include the records as they were prior to the suits, as well as the current records, for the sake of comparison.