Saturday, July 05, 2008

Dara Torres had a suit malfunction in the 100m free.

I am watching the DVR replay of trials tonight and they featured a fast angle of Dara Torres post her 100 free win. She stops twirls for the crowd with the American flag and there it was: 3/4s of her zipper from the bottom up had separated exposing her back.

That's two people in the past month with Speedo LZR zipper failures. Erik Vendt in the 400 free and now Dara Torres at trials. I am going to be blunt and say this suit is CRAP! Its $550 and the quality is sketchy at best. Maybe you are going faster if you get it on but this suit isn't lasting long either.

6 comments:

Scott said...

I'm going to disagree. I think the pressures being placed on the suit are simply unprecedented and the closure design hasn't caught up with the overall suit. I'm sure when they analyze the failures Speedo will be able to come up with the solution (for a few dollars more almost certainly). Not that I'm ever going to buy one!

Unknown said...

Maybe she likes it that way? ;-)

You could see the same view after the 50 (AR) semi. If she were unhappy she certainly could have changed suits in the interim.

Amit said...

I thought I saw on NBC that after the race she went to her coach and partially unzipped the suit in the back.

Tony Austin said...

The zipper was undone from the bottom up rather than the top down. BTW, I went to workout this morning I we were doing a lactic set and this guy's first swim was a 1:01 for the 100 free, then he puts on a fastskin pro and does a 57. Blew my mind!

Václav Patrik Šulik said...

Hey Tony - I had to watch the race on the internet and also saw her coach unzip the suit in back. I'm also a masters swimmer (although a crappy one - the 9-10 kids swimming in a B-meet have faster times than I do) and thought that was really strange. I noticed, after her coach did it, the suit was still fastened at the top and I figured it was just a post-swim comfort issue. If you look for the NBC videos on-line, I think you will see this was the case.

Tony Austin said...

Vaclav, When she twirls, the suit is unzipped from the bottom and unzipped part way down from the top. My opinion is that the suit has zipper problem. Erik Vendt's suit did the same thing before a race. ANyway, maybe it's a feature and not a bug.

I predict TYR will sell more Tracers than Speedo sells LZrs because the LZRs don't last very long.