Swimming

Scratching the surface: technology and swimming Download PDF

In 1908 the first year reliable records were kept for both men and women, the fastest times in the 100 metres freestyle swimming event were 65.6 seconds and 95 seconds respectively. A century later, the men's record time has fallen by nearly a third, and the new women’s record, established in 2017, has almost been halved.Human beings haven’t evolved flippers, scales or gills over the past hundred years, so what accounts for these massive improvements in performance?

Technology and swimming

As with virtually all other sports, the answer is technology. The athletes who set the records in 1908 would have been wearing full-body swimsuits made of wool that absorbed water and therefore became heavier as races went on, slowing speeds even over distances as short as 100 metres. By 2012 technology had become so advanced with the introduction of Speedo’s LZR suits, which mimicked the skin structure of sharks, that the International Federation for Swimming (commonly known by its French acronym FINA) banned the full-body LZR suits, while some argued that they constituted to “technological doping.”1

Technology has helped in other aspects of the sport as well, and been met with less resistance. Gary Hall Sr, a three- time Olympic medal winner who has held the world record in five events, divides it into three segments: technology for training, competing and recovery; technology for communication with swimmers; and technology for improving techniques. Within these three segments, says Mr Hall, who is now the head coach at The Race Club, a training facility that focuses on swimming technique, there have been advances both large and small. Take swimming goggles, for example. “If you go way back, the unanimous consensus [of opinion] was that swimming goggles probably had more impact on our ability to train and our ability to compete at a higher level than anything else.” Mr Hall explains that goggles allowed swimmers to train for longer and improved their vision during races, two key aspects of overall performance.

Para-athletic swimmers and technology

Technology has helped para-athletes in similar and different ways. Since no prosthetics or other assistive devices can be worn during races, para-athletes benefit from advances in materials sciences, training and techniques, just as able-bodied athletes do, but they’ve also benefited from advances that help them overcome other impediments. This is especially true for hearing and vision-impaired athletes. The Blind Cap, developed by a collaboration between Samsung, a South Korean electronics manufacturer, and the Spanish Paralympic Committee, uses a vibration system and Bluetooth technology to alert vision-impaired swimmers when they need to make the turn at the end of the lane. This marks a vast improvement over the old system of coaches waiting to tap approaching swimmers on the head with a stick, as does the seemingly simple practice of installing LED tube lighting on the starting blocks so that swimmers who are deaf or hard of hearing don’t need to rely on more cumbersome cues to signal the start of a race.

Still, more needs to be done in the area, according to Rod Havriluk, president of Swimming Technology Research, an institute and consultancy dedicated to improving swimming techniques. “There have been relatively few studies [in para-athlete swimming] and hopefully that will change,” Mr Havriluk says, citing as an example the work of Jan Prins, founder and director of the Aquatic Research Laboratory at the University of Hawaii, who in 2010 published and presented findings on how different types of amputees could benefit from different types of propulsion in the water.

Redefining limits: the future of technology and swimming

The question now for able-bodied and para-athletes alike is how far they can go. “There’s a limit to how fast a human [can] go in water,” says Mr Hall Sr, but the existing records will be broken, “it’s just a matter of when”.

That said, at least in swimming and, more specifically, in the 100 metres freestyle, humans appear to have been knocking up against those limits for some time. The downward slope of the chart above has levelled off over the past four decades, particularly for men, for whom the current record has been standing for nearly a decade. And the tenths of a second that are being shaved off record times for men and women alike are growing smaller. Mr Hall Sr says that soon new records will need to be measured in hundredths of seconds rather than tenths.

But there will be new records and, barring a sudden evolutionary leap in human capabilities, those records will almost entirely be attributable to developments in technology. Mr Havriluk believes that, at this point, research into improving technique rather than materials will yield better results, which makes sense since the sport’s international governing bodies have already shown their reluctance to allow advances in materials to provide outsized advantages to competitors. “It would be interesting,” he says, “to see if a swimmer puts US$500 into the purchase of a suit as opposed to US$500 spent on improving their technique. Honestly, I would find expect a much bigger time-drop with the technique [investment].”

It also comes down to dissemination, however. There are a number of existing technologies for improving performance that have yet to be adopted by the wider swimming community. “We are at the infancy of getting technology into swimming,” says Mr Hall Sr, “which may seem surprising, but I do feel we are just scratching the surface of what we are going to be able to do.”