If the full body rubber suits do end up getting banned, why should USMS follow their lead on this issue? (i.e. assuming the suits would continue to be manufactured).
Isn't Masters mostly for each individual to pursue what they want and the level they want out of the sport?
If the full body suit is preferred by many USMS participants, why not satisfy the base by keeping it available?
What's really the point of forcing old USMS swimmers out of their girdles if FINA bans them?
John Smith
I can't swear to this, but I am pretty sure that the predictive model that Chris linked to was done by our very own USMS colleague, Joel Stager, Ph.D., an exercise physiologist at U. Indiana's Councilman Center for Swimming Science.
If this is the study he told me about, he and his colleagues took the data from previous Olympics and number crunched the trajectory of ever-improving times over the years to predict the likely times at the (then upcoming) Beijing Olympics.
They had also done this for the previous Olympics and were able to predict, with quite a bit of precision, what the actual times turned out to be. The suit technology at that time was still pre-LZR--not sure it if it was FSPro yet or the FS1 or FS2, but these suits did not bust the predicted curves, leading the researchers to conclude they did not provide a ludicrously unfair advantage to those that used them. In fact, some interpretators of this previous study used it to indicate that the earlier tech suits didn't do much, and may even have been sort of placebos disguised as swimming costumes.
Not so for the LZR/B70 generation of suits. These allowed swimmers to swim much faster in most events than the predicted improvement that swimmers had been showing for decades of Olympics.
Chris is probably in a better position to explain all this than I am. And Joel Stager is certainly in a better postion to do so. (He will be at LCM, and I can ask him.)
But in terms of your question--"where is the data?"--the "data" are the Olympic winning times for each event over X number of past Olympics (not sure how far they went back); these times are then fitted onto a graph and the equation that best describes its change over time is then applied to predict the next Olympics; and finally the actual times and the predicted times are compared.
In most cases, the actual improvement in times with the suits at Bejing proved to be more than a full standard deviation better than the mathematical model (which had been heretofore accurate for decades) predicted they should be. The idea they were nothing more than placebos no longer remotely applied. These suits caused the smooth, ever descending line on the graph to take a sudden and steep bend in the direction of hell! (The final resting place, as FINA officials would soon enough discover, for all Faustian bargains.)
That's the data.
The sad part for those of us who actually like the suits, if for no other reason that they allow us to avoid body shaving, is that Speedo could have had a nice little market.
But then they contacted NASA and got the rocket scientists involved.
Nothing good comes when the rocket scientists start mucking around in pool water.
I can't swear to this, but I am pretty sure that the predictive model that Chris linked to was done by our very own USMS colleague, Joel Stager, Ph.D., an exercise physiologist at U. Indiana's Councilman Center for Swimming Science.
If this is the study he told me about, he and his colleagues took the data from previous Olympics and number crunched the trajectory of ever-improving times over the years to predict the likely times at the (then upcoming) Beijing Olympics.
They had also done this for the previous Olympics and were able to predict, with quite a bit of precision, what the actual times turned out to be. The suit technology at that time was still pre-LZR--not sure it if it was FSPro yet or the FS1 or FS2, but these suits did not bust the predicted curves, leading the researchers to conclude they did not provide a ludicrously unfair advantage to those that used them. In fact, some interpretators of this previous study used it to indicate that the earlier tech suits didn't do much, and may even have been sort of placebos disguised as swimming costumes.
Not so for the LZR/B70 generation of suits. These allowed swimmers to swim much faster in most events than the predicted improvement that swimmers had been showing for decades of Olympics.
Chris is probably in a better position to explain all this than I am. And Joel Stager is certainly in a better postion to do so. (He will be at LCM, and I can ask him.)
But in terms of your question--"where is the data?"--the "data" are the Olympic winning times for each event over X number of past Olympics (not sure how far they went back); these times are then fitted onto a graph and the equation that best describes its change over time is then applied to predict the next Olympics; and finally the actual times and the predicted times are compared.
In most cases, the actual improvement in times with the suits at Bejing proved to be more than a full standard deviation better than the mathematical model (which had been heretofore accurate for decades) predicted they should be. The idea they were nothing more than placebos no longer remotely applied. These suits caused the smooth, ever descending line on the graph to take a sudden and steep bend in the direction of hell! (The final resting place, as FINA officials would soon enough discover, for all Faustian bargains.)
That's the data.
The sad part for those of us who actually like the suits, if for no other reason that they allow us to avoid body shaving, is that Speedo could have had a nice little market.
But then they contacted NASA and got the rocket scientists involved.
Nothing good comes when the rocket scientists start mucking around in pool water.
