The Suit Ban of 2010: When Swimming Outlawed Its Own Records
The 2010 FINA ban on polyurethane swimsuits: what the suits actually did, why 43 records fell in eight days in Rome, and how the brief came back.
Speed On In Your Speedos: The Sydney Knitting Mill That Named the Swim Brief
How a 1914 Sydney mill named the swim brief in a staff competition, won eight golds at Melbourne and survived the suit ban that reset the record books.
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Most garments are named by committees. The swim brief was named by a bloke at a staff competition in Sydney in 1928, and his line was so good it survived a hundred years, twelve Olympic cycles and one international rules crisis. "Speed on in your Speedos." Say it out loud. It has no business being that catchy.
The company behind it was founded in 1914 by Alexander MacRae, a Scottish immigrant who set up a knitting mill making underwear and hosiery, which is a very satisfying origin story for a blog like this one. Swimwear came later, and by 1927 the mill had produced the racerback costume that made its reputation. The naming contest came the following year, and MacRae Knitting Mills became Speedo Knitting Mills. A hosiery business had accidentally invented a noun.
The first golden age
The early wins came fast. At the 1932 Los Angeles Games, Clare Dennis took gold in the 200m breaststroke in a silk Speedo, an event remembered partly for the swimming and partly for the fuss about how much shoulder blade the racerback exposed. Standards move.
Nylon arrived in the suits in 1955, and the timing could not have been better, because the following year Australia hosted the Melbourne Olympics. The Australian men won eight swimming golds in Speedo briefs, on home water, in front of the world's cameras. A local knitwear brand became a global one in about a fortnight, and the swim brief became what serious swimmers wore.
It stayed that way for decades. At Mexico City in 1968, 27 of the 29 swimming gold medallists wore the brand. Munich in 1972 and Montreal in 1976 kept the run going. If you have a mental image of a 20th century Olympic swimmer, you are picturing a man in a brief and a swimming cap, and that image was manufactured in a Sydney factory that used to make socks. Six Briefs That Built the Modern World
The suit that broke the sport
Then technology got ambitious. The Fastskin arrived for Sydney 2000, when 13 of the 15 swimming records broken went to swimmers wearing it. Eight years later came the LZR Racer, launched in February 2008 and developed with help from NASA wind tunnel testing and fluid flow analysis, which cut skin friction drag by roughly a quarter compared with the previous suit.
What followed was chaos of the most enjoyable kind. Michael Phelps won eight golds in Beijing. Records fell in clusters, and by August 2009 something like 93 world records had gone to swimmers in the suit. Forty three of them went at a single championships in Rome, in eight days of racing in one building. The Suit Ban of 2010: When Swimming Outlawed Its Own Records Swimming had reached the point where the equipment was outperforming the athletes, and everyone knew it.
FINA voted in July 2009 to end it. From 1 January 2010, men's suits could cover no more than waist to knee, women's shoulder to knee, and everything had to be woven textile rather than polyurethane.
Read that men's rule again, because it is the most quietly flattering sentence ever written about our subject. Faced with the fastest swimwear ever engineered, the governing body of world swimming responded by legislating the sport back down to the jammer and the brief. Not as nostalgia. As the fair maximum.
Why the history matters
The swim brief is routinely written about as a survivor, a novelty, an oddity that hung on from a less self-conscious era. The record says something else. It is the garment competitive swimming chose when it was choosing on speed alone, kept when the technology went too far, and protected in the rule book when it had to draw a line. Every Olympic final you watch is swum inside the boundary those 2009 rules set. The Speedo Comeback Is Real (and We Have the Numbers)
The classic cut is still made, still sold in the same shape, and still the cheapest way to look like you know what you are doing at a pool. classic Speedo swim brief ยท chlorine-resistant training brief
A hundred and twelve years after a Scotsman started knitting socks in Sydney, his mill's best product is still a swim brief with a good slogan attached and eight Melbourne golds on its record. Speed on. Your First Speedo: The Complete Buying Guide