This bump suit, which resembles the Under Armour Mach 39, was created by Ted Altshuler and tested by Dave Cruikshank more than two decades ago. Credit: Courtesy of Ted Altshuler

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Sochi, Russia – Ted Altshuler isn't sure why U.S. speedskaters have been a study in futility at the Winter Olympics.

He does know this much:

It's not the skin suit's fault.

"I have the utmost confidence in the technology," Altshuler said, "because it simply works."

He should know. He designed a suit similar to the one U.S. skaters have worn in Sochi more than 20 years ago in his apartment in Milwaukee.

Some of the drag-reduction concepts built into Under Armour's Mach 39 suit – unveiled at the Olympics and perhaps a convenient scapegoat for the U.S. team's underwhelming performance – were first tested by Altshuler before current Olympian Emery Lehman was born.

He has worked on the technology for two decades and consulted with Lockheed Martin and Under Armour during the early stages of the Mach 39's development.

"I have been working with this for quite some time, have been involved in numerous wind-tunnel experiments as well as have done field testing with my own version of this technology," he said. "Using the techniques I have developed, I can decrease overall drag up to 5% for a competitive cyclist.

"If applied correctly, similar benefits are achievable for speedskaters."

In 1992, Altshuler was a student at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh when he watched Bonnie Blair win a pair of gold medals at the Albertville Games. Inspired to give the sport a try, he moved to Milwaukee in 1993 to see how far speedskating would take him.

The answer: not far.

"I was a mediocre skater," Altshuler said. "I called myself the best of the worst."

But he had a masters degree in computational fluid dynamics, and he had an idea.

"I thought, 'Wouldn't it be neat to come up with something clothing-wise that would make you faster?' " he said. "I did a back-of-the-napkin sketch of velocities and body size. The numbers work out where we as humans act like golf balls."

Altshuler's theory was that tiny bumps on a skin suit would disrupt air flowing over a skater and reduce form drag, the phenomenon in which a low-pressure pocket forms behind a moving object and essentially pulls it backward.

Golf balls have dimples to reduce form drag. Without them, they would drop out of the sky.

Altshuler modified several skin suits in his apartment in Milwaukee, using a hot glue gun to create rows of tiny bumps. He still has the old suits and they bear an uncanny resemblance to the Mach 39.

Blair and fellow Olympians David Cruikshank and Nathaniel Mills tested Altshulers's suits.

"We only tried it a couple times during tempo workouts and practices," said Cruikshank, who made four Olympic teams, married Blair and now coaches at the Pettit Center. "I don't remember the numbers. My gut says they were two-tenths of a second better (per lap). That's a lot."

Cruikshank and others thought Altshuler was ahead of his time. They called him "Golf Ball Ted" or "Professor Ted" and believed in him. But they were hesitant to try his funny-looking suits in competition.

"It's hard to tell Bonnie Blair, 'Hey, try this new suit,' when she's on her way to a world championship," Cruikshank said. "Obviously, Ted was on to something but it was so early in the development stage."

Altshuler also tested his suits on cyclists and results showed a significant decrease in drag. But then he started running into roadblocks. He applied for a grant from the U.S. Olympic Committee but was turned down. He had applied for a patent in 1992, but it was rejected.

"The patent wasn't awarded for multiple reasons," he said. "I was only 23 years old and didn't have a lot of experience or money and couldn't do it like a company could."

Altshuler next brought his dimpled-suit idea to Spyder. His goal was to sell the exclusive rights to his technology and maybe even land an engineering job with the ski apparel company. Spyder was intrigued, according to Altshuler.

"We went back and forth trying to negotiate," he said. "They sent me a racing suit and I modified it. Towards the end, I received a letter from David Jacobs, the owner of Spyder: 'Dear Ted, I do not plan to proceed with the dimple.'

"Then they went and stole my idea. They introduced a racing suit called SpeedWyre in 1996 or '97 and they had Picabo Street in it. Shortly afterward it was outlawed from downhill skiing. I sent letters to Spyder saying, 'You ripped off my idea.' They basically told me to go screw myself."

Altshuler moved on with his life and started his own business, Old School Industries, in 1996. He came up with a product called Speed Tape for triathletes and cyclists. It's a textured, adhesive tape that athletes stick to their arms and legs and helps reduce drag.

Lance Armstrong and his Radio Shack team tested Speed Tape in a wind tunnel in North Carolina in 2009, Altshuler said, "and we saw amazing results for head-on airflow." The plan was for Armstrong to wear the tape during Stage 19 of his final Tour de France, "but Lance was far enough back that it was left on the shelf."

That brings us to Under Armour, Lockeed Martin and the Mach 39.

Altshuler chaired U.S. Speedskating's sports science committee and was brought on board as a consultant for the top-secret suit project.

"We had meetings and our wind tunnel test in Baltimore and Ted was invited to jump in on those," said Chris Laughman, product manager for Under Armour. "He brought one of his prototype suits and it helped confirm some of the things the Lockheed engineers wanted to put on the suit."

Cruikshank also was a member of the sports science committee, since dissolved by U.S. Speedskating president Mike Plant, and was invited to the wind tunnel test.

"Ted was the brains behind the whole thing," Cruikshank said. "All I did was take a plane ride out and show them how it would fit an athlete. I had a very, very small part in any of that."

U.S. speedskaters first wore the Mach 39 during a pre-Olympics camp in Collalbo, Italy, just before coming to Sochi. The Collalbo oval is outdoors, however, and it was impossible to get meaningful feedback in cold, windy conditions.

The skaters wore the suit for the first time in real competition in Sochi and as poor performances mounted, it came under increasing suspicion as the cause. Midway through the Games, the U.S. team ditched the Mach 39 and used the suits they had worn during a successful fall World Cup season. Those suits also were made by Under Armour.

But the results have been no better.

U.S. Speedskating will do a thorough analysis of what went wrong after the Games. If there was a small problem with the skin suit, Altshuler said, it probably was one of many.

"If you have two equally fast skaters and one wears an aerodynamic racing suit and the other does not," he said, "I will put my money on the one with the suit."