Beyond the shark skin suit: faster designs and deeper analysis advance the high-tech sport of swimming.

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To the untrained eye, few activities seem to be as low-tech as swimming--just you and your buoyancy out there communing with the whales. You do it barefoot. How primitive is that?

As we know, though, swimming ranks among world-class sports, where technology, technique, and conditioning rule.

The high-tech nature of swimming was clearly apparent in two recent events. Speedo, which prides itself on pushing the envelope that swimmers wear in the water, unveiled what it calls its fastest swimsuit so far. The design is based on research using 400 body scans of athletes, a NASA wind tunnel, Fluent CFD software, and a water flume at Otago University in New Zealand.

A day or so after Speedo showed the suit at a gathering in New York, a British organization, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, issued a press release describing work it is funding to develop software that will analyze a swimmer's performance in real time.

Both developments, it seems, address drag that affects a swimmer gliding through the water in a rigid streamlined position, as after a dive or a turn. According to Speedo, a competitor in a 50-meter race may hold a streamlined position for as many as 15 meters.

Speedo's new suit, which the company calls the LZR Racer, was developed by the company's research unit, Aqualab, with the aid of athletes, coaches, scientists, and engineers.

According to Speedo, the LZR (pronounced "laser") Racer reduces passive drag on a swimmer by about 10 percent below that of the Fast-skin FSII, a suit introduced in 2004. Speedo says the FSII was worn by 53 percent of the gold medal winners in the Olympic Games that summer. An article, "Swim Like the Sharks," in the May 2004 issue discussed the development of the FSII suit. The suit made use of a material that Speedo had developed to simulate a shark's skin, particularly the small surface projections called denticles that help manage the flow of water. It also was contoured to control drag and for ease of movement.

Speedo introduced a suit last year made of a new material called LZR Pulse, which was even faster. It is a water-repellent combination of elastane yarn and ultra-fine nylon thread. More than 20 world records have been broken by swimmers wearing that suit, Speedo says.

According to the company, the LZR Racer experiences about 5 percent less drag than last year's suit. The LZR Racer consists of three pieces of fabric, bonded rather than stitched for a smoother surface. Speedo says it has applied for 16 patents worldwide in connection with the suit.