After seeing a woman break 24 seconds and I think we can stop the discussion of "IF" the LZR suit is faster and start thinking "how much faster".
The previous line of suits (Fastskin and so on) were pretty similiar to a shaved swimmer. Sure - they do feel like they make you float, but overall the times seemed to move along "in line" with what I would expect to see in terms of improvements in the sport. If the previous suits would have been that much faster than shaving, you would have never seen people just using the legskins. By the way - for us Masters swimmers there was always the added benefit of keeping in all the "extra layers of skin".
So how much faster are the LZR suits ?
If I had to guess based on the results so far, I would say 0.25 to 0.30 per 50 and double that for the 100. I can see the Bernard going 48 low in the 100 and I can see Sullivan getting close or just breaking the 50 record. It makes sense that Libby Lenton would swim a 24.2 or so in the 50.
I think one of the top regular teams out there should do a test - you need a good amount of world class swimmers training together to be able to do a test. Here is the test I would propose:
8-10 swimmers
2 days of testing
4x50 on 10 minutes all out
Day 1 - swim 2 with a Fastskin2 followed by 2 with the LZR
Day 2 - swim 2 with the LZR followed by 2 with the Fastskin2
Get the averages of all 10 swimmers - maybe drop the high and low and there you go.
Why do the test ? I would HAVE to know. Swimming is a big part of your life and you just set a massive PR using this new technology - my very first question would be " How much was me and how much was the suit?"?
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Stats aside, I can't see how anyone can think that the LZR has no effect after the number of world records broken since its release (almost all in the LZR) and the dramatic drop in times since then in such a short period of time where training/etc could have hardly had an impact. Then again, that's just my opinion.
Statistically speaking, if we use some expected improvement in average times of say the top X swimmers in a certain event over x time and then calculate how far from the norm the improvement was since the release of the LZR, I think you would find the null hypothesis that Chris refers to (i.e. the LZR has no effect) quite unlikely to hold w reasonable choice of p. I'm too lazy to do it right now though.
Stats aside, I can't see how anyone can think that the LZR has no effect after the number of world records broken since its release (almost all in the LZR) and the dramatic drop in times since then in such a short period of time where training/etc could have hardly had an impact. Then again, that's just my opinion.
Statistically speaking, if we use some expected improvement in average times of say the top X swimmers in a certain event over x time and then calculate how far from the norm the improvement was since the release of the LZR, I think you would find the null hypothesis that Chris refers to (i.e. the LZR has no effect) quite unlikely to hold w reasonable choice of p. I'm too lazy to do it right now though.
