This is my first year doing triathlons, but I was a swimmer more or less continuously for 12 years until I graduated from college and retired in 1986. I am thinking about whether to buy a wetsuit for next season.
Watching this year’s Olympic competition, I see that Ian Thorpe is fairly unique in wearing a full wetsuit. Most freestylers wear bib johns; most male swimmers in strokes other than freestyle seem to wear suits that look like long shorts. But, everything I have read about triathlon wetsuits suggests that a full suit is fastest. If this is true, why don’t more Olympic swimmers wear full wetsuits? Is is because wetsuits benefit poor swimmers the most (as Tom Demerly said as part of his announcing duties in Sylvania this morning), and the good swimmers don’t need them? Is it because the loss of feel for the water with a full wetsuit offsets any advantage from covering your arms? You would figure that Olympic swimmers would be doing what is fastest since you can win or lose swimming races by .01 seconds. Any ideas?
Another thing that I see just seems odd to me. Almost all swimmers wear their goggles with the strap under their caps. I rarely wore a cap although I obviously do so in a triathlon. But, my thinking was always that it is better to wear the goggles over the cap just in case the goggles got loose, and I needed to flip them off. Mostly as a curiosity, what do you do?
A lot of triathletes, especially those that didn’t come from a swim background, wear the goggle strap on under the cap just in case the goggles get kick off by someone’s foot during the open water pack swim melee that usually ensues.
Triathletes wear wetsuits for the buoyancy, which is also what makes them faster for everyone, ex-swimmers included. The only question to ask yourself is whether you want your arms covered or not. Some swimmers think having their arms covered reduces their ‘feel’ for the water. Others don’t. It’s a matter of personal preference.
Ian Thorpe is not wearing a wetsuit, he is wearing a swimsuit that covers his whole body. It’s made out of a special material that helps reduce drag in the water. But it gives no extra buoyancy.
So it’s the buoyancy that makes triathletes faster in wetsuits, but more the hydrodynamic effects of the swimming suits that make the swimmers faster? In other words, I am so clueless about both triathlons and post 1986 swimming that I am comparing apples and oranges.
A good tri wetsuit will provide both buoyancy and hydrodynamics. Probably for most average and below-average swimmers, the buoyancy provides the most benefit.
breaststroke is about the only stroke where u dont get the benefit of the fullsuit…apparently. for some people i guess it comes down to a preference thing.
I have a buddy who wore a farmer john wetsuit (long legs, but no sleeves) because it made him feel like the extra bouyancy in the legs was helping keep his chest and head down and swimming “downhill”. It’s a lot about feel.
Wetsuits, since they provide artificial flotation, are illegal in pool swimming competition. (They are also illegal in sanctioned open water competion too and they hold open water competions down to 57 F but that is another story.)
Thorpe’s suit and the other non traditional suits on display are not wetsuits. The material is basically the same as a simple lycra suit. They are very carefully fit to the individual swimmer and some models can only be worn once since once they stretch they lose their drag reducing advantage.
If you look at the underwater shots of Thorpe, his suit is covered with bubbles. (I’ll bet the others are too but his black one really shows the bubbles.) Rumor has it that the real key to these suits is that, while they are billed as drag reducing, their outer texture is designed to catch and hold tiny bubbles thus adding to bouyancy. In essence, they could be just an end around the no wetsuit rule.