A Follow Up to the Olympic Fashion Post

I got a comment recently, and since I doubt my regular readers are checking the comments from four days ago to see if anyone made any valid points, I thought I'd bring it to light and comment on it a little myself. The comment came from an anonymous poster, so I can't give anyone specific credit, but here it is:

"The real reason men water polo players wear speedos instead of the 'jammers' (almost knee-length) or the full body suits: Heat. The swimmers aka Michael Phelps want sheer speed in the water, which begs less drag. The water polo players actually have to tread water the whole game, and all their practices (the pool is intentially too deep for them to touch bottem - can you imagine them boucing off the bottom all the time? They waould all be 7 foot tall!).

"Having swam in knee length jammers and small speedos - there is a SIGNIFICANT heat build-up difference - ever hear of 'water cooled' as in engines? Those guys move their legs treading water so uch that if one side wore ?modest?suits and the one wore speredo bikinis, the
speedo side would have an advantage due to the difference in the leg muscle's heat dissipation."

I think someone may have missed the tongue-in-cheek nature of the post, but they do make some good points.

Honestly, the water polo section was my weakest critique to start with. Pat Forde of ESPN.com had been making fun of their caps with those big ear-protecting bumps, but that is an entirely functional piece of equipment and I didn't want to mock entirely functional fashion. This is why I didn't mock the wrestlers' singlets or the swimmers' bodysuits that are reminiscent of the 1800s' full-body bathingsuits. But really, if they wanted to be real men, they'd be like many rugby players and just tape those ears down or go completely bareheaded.

Turns out that there is a reason for those smaller suits after all. I knew they shouldn't be wearing trunks in the water. Those guys are clobbering each other. Anything loose would be pulled off. I honestly didn't consider that heat build up would even be close to an issue here. As Anonymous mentioned, water tends to be a very good heat sink, and being a good conductor wicks away body heat much more quickly than air. This is why you can quickly go hypothermic in water at a temperature that is perfectly safe in dry air. Plus, I was a competitive swimmer and part of our practices involved treading water for up to 30 minutes straight at a time to build up endurance. I don't ever remember feeling even slightly warm and I start sweating when it's 75 outside.

However, I've never played water polo, so I'll award the point to Anonymous anyway. Besides, when I was on the swim team, I was wearing Speedos. That was before the bodysuits and "jammers" were common so I didn't have any way to compare the types of suits. Maybe my skimpy suit was the reason I never felt hot. It's also quite possible that the fabric in these suits isn't all that breathable and restricts the flow of water to and from the skin that would act as a good cooling agent. The traditional Speedo just isn't big enough to really judge how breathable it is.

There was one comment made by anonymous that I find entirely ridiculous:

"Why don't they all wear jammers making it equal? Maybe because they have no prudish hang-ups and simply spend way, way too much time in the pool to care about Americans opinions. The rest of the world has no problem with speedos."

Well, the first point wasn't ridiculous. No reasonable person would expect all of the athletes in a sport to move to a lower functioning type of equipment or uniform just for fashion purposes and I wouldn't dare to suggest that, even in a light-hearted humor piece. (Any time I dish out fashion advice, I'm doing so to be at least half funny. Except for the thing about the eyebrows. The overplucked and overwaxed look is ALWAYS worse than the natural look unless there's no clear divide between the two brows. The ideal is often somewhere in the between the two extremes, of course, but get them too thin and you start looking creepy. Most people just aren't that ugly that they need much in the way of facial modification to look decent anyway.) The ridiculous part of the comment was that my critique came from any prudish hang-ups about exposed skin.

Believe me, that had nothing to do with it. The girls that are dancing (why?) on the sand during timeouts (you'll occasionally catch a glimpse of them as they come back from commercial, or at least we saw one during the only match we watched) wear very attractive bikinis, but theirs are designed for looks, not athletic play. I never had a problem wearing a Speedo when I swam or seeing other people in Speedos when they were competing, but the cut of swimsuit just looks bad
compared to other options. The jammers look better not because they cover more (when it's that tight, it's not really covering anything) but because they create more appealing lines than the Speedos that cut a horizontal line disconnecting torso from legs. The jammers do a better job of transitioning from torso to limbs and create a pleasingly long vertical line that compliments the shape of the body. Outside of the athletic world, there's also the sleaze factor to take in as the guys who wear these are often the creepy mid-life crisis guys hitting on girls in their 20s. Speedos may be popular on the beaches of Europe, but it'd be a lot like me dressing up in a cycling jersey and tights with one of those teardrop aerodynamic helmets just to go on a leisurely ride around the beach on vacation.

So my final verdict is that the Speedos still look bad, but they may be necessary in water polo.