“Some people's tactics are to utilise a really strong swimming background and go hard on the swim, to make sure that they're at the front of the field coming out of the water,” says Greg Stevens, performance innovation consultant at the UK Sports Institute (UKSI).
“Others are strong runners, so need some help with the swim to make sure that they don't get left behind the break when it gets on the bike. And others are OK in both of those, but they're going to try and shoot ahead on the bike.”
It is vital, therefore, that each triathlete’s kit is optimised for both the event and their own personal approach. That was the aim of a recent project at the UKSI, which developed new ‘trisuits’ to boost athlete’s swimming and cycling speeds.
The project reaped its rewards on 31 July as Team GB triathletes Alex Yee and Beth Potter won gold and bronze medals respectively in the men’s and women’s individual events. A week later, they secured bronze in the mixed relay with teammates Georgia Taylor-Brown and Samuel Dickinson.
Focused on sports where there are opportunities to improve the chance of winning medals, or to climb higher up the podium, the UKSI’s 18-strong innovation team includes engineers, bio-mechanists and data scientists. The trisuit project came about due to a change in Paralympic rules – with that event starting this week (28 August), we spoke to Stevens about the engineering approaches getting Team GB triathletes over the line as quickly as possible.
Hybrid skinsuit
The change in Paralympic rules sounds simple enough – allowing the tight-fitting skinsuits to stretch down to the elbow. But the UKSI team knew that small change could make a “substantial difference”, thanks to their work developing cycling skinsuits since before the Beijing games in 2008. Expertise in fabric choices and how the body moves through the water when swimming was also useful.
“It's not just about sewing some cycling sleeves onto a trisuit,” says Stevens. “We could probably make a bigger difference by looking at the skinsuit as a whole and improving all of it in the three areas of performance.”
Paralympic triathlete Claire Cashmore (Credit: British Triathlon)
As the team started the project, they realised some of the approaches they were taking could also provide a boost for Olympic triathletes. Sleeves down to the elbow are not allowed in that event, but performance specialists nonetheless want to cover as much of the body as possible.
“The aim was to basically provide them with a suit that offered better swim performance, better bike performance, and also one that doesn't compromise them on the run… they're not overheating or too cold,” says Stevens.
Wind tunnel tests can provide useful information for the cycling element, providing the drag percentage that an optimised skinsuit will save and enabling predictions of how much time could be shaved off a race.
It is not as easy to measure the drag in water, Stevens says, but there are ways of doing it. The team also had vital knowledge from previous competitions, such as the types of fabric that are fast through water, which parts of the body different fabrics should cover, and where the seams should go.
“Your body position in swimming is very much streamlined,” Stevens says. “The type of drag that you get is very different from cycling, where it's more bluff body. So we were trying to create a bit of a hybrid.”
Feeling it
Triathlon is a difficult sport to model and simulate, so most of the development relied on working closely with the athletes to make sure they were happy in each of the disciplines. Issues to look out for might have included feeling weighed down with water during the swim, or slight changes to body position that could slow them down. “We needed their expertise in how it feels when they're running, how it feels when they're in the water, and whether it rubs or not on the bike,” says Stevens.
The innovation team worked with pure textiles experts, who recommended fabrics with particular properties, which might have included things like two-way stretch or some water repellence. Stevens is unable to give much more detail away, partly because UKSI is extending the number of sports it works with and is “picky” about where it gets its fabrics from.
Characteristics of different fabrics make an undeniable impact on performance, however. “The texture, and the direction of the texture, and the orientation, really makes a difference depending on the position on the body, but also the medium that you're travelling through, whether it's water or air,” says Stevens. “The type of texture and the type of fabric will be very athlete-specific, as well as sports-specific.”
Depending on the athlete and their individual approach to the event, small tweaks can be made to push them forward in a certain leg or protect their performance in another, or to keep them slightly warmer or cooler as they take part. The bespoke suits are fitted to each competitor. Options can include having a higher neck, more open back, or shorter shorts.
During the development process, which was shorter than usual due to the delay to the Tokyo Olympics, the team also explored options for different weather conditions, which in Paris varied from pouring rain to high humidity and temperatures. They also had to work within the boundaries of the Team GB look and style.
Once athletes finish their post-games downtime, their feedback will tell the UKSI team what worked and what did not, informing future projects.
‘They didn’t just win because they had a fancy suit’
Of course, Olympic and Paralympic success comes down to the performance of the athletes on the day, following years of dedicated training. As Stevens puts it, “they didn't just win because they had a fancy suit. They're the ones who are putting in the hard yards, and hopefully we've just helped them perform at their best.”
Comfort and confidence were key aims of the projects, he adds. “Ultimately, with all of this – whether it's a shiny bit of carbon on a bicycle, whether it's a skinsuit, whether it's a training intervention, whether it's something to help the coaches – the athlete has got to be front and centre, and I think the best thing that we can do for our athletes, whether it's triathlon or different sports, is them on the start line just concentrating on their performance,” he says.
“For us, that's one of the best outcomes – that they're completely comfortable with what they've got. It doesn't matter what the French are rocking up with, what the Australians have. They're on the starting line, they're concentrating on their race, they can worry about executing it. And looking on from the TV back in the UK, they seemed to be able to do that, and we came away with a decent haul of medals.”
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