When the Canadian ski team takes the world stage at the 2010 Olympics, they’ll be wearing new low-friction, “slippery” suits that were designed by a team at Spyder Active Sports.
But the high-tech suit is top secret — you won’t see it until that first athlete is shredding the course in Vancouver.
“The suit is super smooth, super slick, and that’s the whole idea,” said Spyder’s product director, Phil Shettig. “We went through many different knit surfaces on this fabric in wind-tunnel testing to get the proprietary knit that is the slipperiest we could get.”
To create the suit, Shettig and his team looked at how friction affects aerodynamics. The surface texture of the slippery suit reduces wind friction.
“It’s a lot smoother than the old fabric,” said Steve Nyman, a Super G competitor who has skied in the suit. “When you put it on, it just slides right on.”
Spyder also made a padded version of the slippery suit for the GS and slalom events. “With that padding, they can go straighter at the gates, they can take a more aggressive line, and they can actually be faster.”
However, the padding — which is made from a molecule that hardens upon impact and softens immediately after — created bumps and layers that were not as efficient aerodynamically. The seams and thread used to sew them in increased drag, too. So Spyder pulled the padding from the suit and built it into the skier’s undergarments instead. The company also worked with the maker of the padding to reduce the pad size from 8 mm to 5 mm with the same amount of protection for the skier. Finally, it redesigned the pads so that when the skiers tuck into an aerodynamic position, the pads create a groove for the wind to pass over.
“When we compared our current GS padded suit to our new GS padding system, we’re in the neighborhood of 15 to 20 percent less aerodynamic drag, which is off-the-charts fantastic,” Shettig said.
By comparison, the non-padded slippery suits yield a 1 to 3 percent advantage — an amount Shettig is still pleased with since hundredths of a second matter in the Olympics.
Because of that tiny margin, “We printed ‘Hundies Matter’ on the suit, just to remind and encourage the athletes that a hundredth matters,” said Laura Wisner, senior marketing manager for Spyder.
Spyder will continue to test and tweak the suits until two weeks before the Olympics.
“We’ll do custom suit fittings for all the teams and all the athletes,” Shettig said. “Everything is optimized. Literally. We don’t leave a thing to chance; it’s too important.”
Spyder was founded by David Jacobs of Montreal who skied on the Canadian Team in his younger years. He still leads the company as Chairperson.
