New, Trendy Apparel Is the Strongest Suit

After two days of swimming at the U.S. Olympic trials, let’s say the controversial new swimsuit, the one being marketed by Speedo as Fastskin and by TYR as Aquapel, is not attractive.

Some of the swimmers resemble penguins. They are so snugly-clothed that they seem unable to breathe and they walk with a waddle, fearful of ripping out the seams of this new contraption that has just taken them 20 minutes to put on.

And let’s say you don’t want to have eaten a big meal before you put this thing on. It’s supposed to play the same role on humans the shark’s skin does on the shark. We probably don’t want to see a shark right after he’s eaten an arm and a leg and we absolutely don’t want to see the swimmer who just visited the McDonald’s drive-through lane on his way to the meet. Not in his Fastskin.

In the good old days, there were some great calendars with famous swimmers such as Matt Biondi, who modeled in their briefs and were every bit the male equivalent of pinup girls.

A calendar of men, and women, wearing the new suit will not take a place of honor in any teenagers’ bedroom.

We are seeing these suits, in all the versions--the ones on women that stop at the knees, the one for guys which doesn’t start until the waist and all versions in between--at these trials because of the little company that could.

TYR Sport of Huntington Beach would not gracefully accept the ruling by the U.S. Swimming board of directors this spring that would have banned the controversial new suits from the trials. TYR protested and won. U.S. Swimming backed down with hardly a fight.

Even though FINA, the world governing body for the sport, had already ruled that the suits, which swimmers say make them feel more buoyant and better able to sit on top of the water, were legal and would be approved for the Olympics, U.S. Swimming officials were afraid, they said, that all 1,300 U.S. swimmers who had qualified for the Olympic trials would not be able to acquire the new suits.

Baloney, said TYR.

Matt Zimmer laughs as he looks around the pool area of the Indiana University Natatorium. Zimmer, 28, of Costa Mesa, is a swimmer for Team TYR and an employee of the company.

“Honestly, we never felt we’d win,” Zimmer said. “But as soon as we heard about the ban a bunch of us got together and said, ‘This is wrong.’ How could it be illegal to wear the suit to qualify for trials and then, the day the trials ended, legal to wear the suit again?”

So TYR filed a protest with U.S. Swimming and the U.S. Olympic Committee. TYR, which already had supplied its swimmers with the suit, asked that the ban be lifted and that swimmers be allowed to wear the suit at the trials.

This was in early July and, as Zimmer said, “The timing wasn’t great. If things dragged out and this became a big issue and a distraction to swimmers, we might not be too popular. But we felt like this was the right thing to do.”

Speedo was going to go along with the ban. Was it because Speedo wasn’t ready to outfit its large teams of athletes who had qualified for the trials?

There has been that suspicion. There also have been whispers that Speedo is still having trouble with its suit. There have been reports of fraying at the seams. In fact, Lenny Krayzelburg, Speedo’s top swimmer, didn’t wear the Fastskin Thursday in the men’s 100-meter backstroke preliminary race.

But after two days, nearly 80% of the swimmers here have worn some form of the new suit and nearly half of them have worn the most radical version, the neck-to-ankle type.

TYR and Adidas had promised U.S. Swimming that any competitor who wanted the suit could have one, and there have been no complaints about swimmers who wanted to swim in the suit but couldn’t get one.

How about that. A big deal made out of nothing by an Olympic sport national governing body. “If U.S. Swimming hadn’t banned the suit,” Zimmer said, “there would have never been all this talk about it. So in that way it’s been great for the suit. Lots of free publicity.”

So way to go, TYR, beating the big boys, making them cave in.

Except now we’re stuck with these suits. The swimmers who wear the full-body version are more anonymous than ever. The suit might be a marketer’s dream--new and weird and probably cool-looking to the kids--but who’s going to know the swimmer?

World-record holder Tom Malchow, who wears a full-body Speedo, says it takes him nearly 20 minutes to put on the suit and he will never put it on anywhere he might be spied on.

He’s got to squirm, wiggle, waggle, twist and squish himself into the thing. Could this be a new Olympic sport? Forget the pesky swimming. Let’s make it all about the suit.

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Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com.