By Jason Brooks
John Waring is much like a man sitting at home with a winning lottery ticket.
But it’s a swimsuit, not the lotto, that could make his fortune.
In the office of his business, Bolte Engineering, located upstairs in his suburban Orleans home, he’s waiting for a call.
Waring hopes the call will be from Nike, Speedo or another sports-apparel maker saying they will buy the rights to his high-tech swimsuit design.
That design helped at least four swimmers break records and win gold medals at the World Aquatic Championships in Australia last month.
Waring, a 34-year-old engineer, expects a call to come in the next two weeks and lead to a deal that will make him rich.
He expects the deal would result in the mass manufacturing of Waring’s fast, “vortex generator” swimsuit, which uses small silicone ridges on the bum of the suit to increase a swimmer’s speed in the water.
Two of Waring’s great loves in life — swimming and engineering — brought him to this point.
Three years ago, Waring, then an aerospace engineer with the Canadian government and an amateur swimmer (in 1983 he was a member of the Canadian swim team), came up with the idea for his swimsuit design in the locker room at Carleton University’s pool.
“Someone in the change room mentioned that Speedo had some funky new suits,” recalls Waring. He doesn’t remember who said it, or what the “funky new suits” were, but within five or ten minutes he clicked on an idea.
By applying aerospace engineering principles to swimming, he thought of using “vortex generators,” a drag-reduction technique, on a swimsuit.
“Humans aren’t like dolphins,” explains Waring. “A human isn’t designed to swim in water. We have lots of protrusions on our body, the biggest being the butt. Normally, when you’re swimming, your bum creates a big drag.
“When the flow of water meets a swimmer’s bum, it’s like running down a hall and trying to turn a sharp corner on a wet floor.”
The water can’t make the turn, so the flow separates, and creates a big whirlpool behind the bum, sucking the swimmer back.
That’s where the vortex generators come in — the rubbery, oblong ridges on the bum of Waring’s suits, that are a few centimetres long and a few millimetres high. They direct water to form vortices, or small spirals, that follow the curves of the body, reducing drag. Similar technology is used on airplanes, says Waring.
His suits shave three-tenths of a second off a swimmer’s time for every 100 m, he says, often the difference between winning a race and not getting any medal at all.
Waring did some research, applied for patents, and began manufacturing prototypes of the suit with the help of a friend, Ross Cowie, a design engineer.
“The earlier suits were made in Ross’s kitchen, but the most recent ones were made in his basement, because it was interfering with dinner,” says Waring.
After some ugly, glued-together prototypes, the suit’s first breakthrough came when top U.S. swimmer Jenny Thompson wore a sleek Speedo suit with Waring’s ridges injection-molded to the bum, at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta. She won three gold medals.
Speedo paid Waring $45,000 to develop 60 suits for the 1996 Olympics, but since the suits weren’t ready until just before the games, Thompson was the only swimmer who felt comfortable enough to wear the suit in competition.
In Australia last month, Speedo bought 20 more suits, and at least four swimmers chose to wear the suit, including Thompson. Since nobody tells him who wears the suits, Waring found out by following coverage of the games on the Internet.
He hopes the success of the suit in Australia and the resulting publicity will drive up the value of a potential licensing deal.
Nike, Speedo and another company, Tyr, based in California, have two weeks to get back to him about a contract — a deadline he set. Based on conversations with executives, Waring believes a deal is close at hand.
He figures his swimsuit design is worth roughly $500,000 to $1 million dollars, an indication of the value of the contract he may sign. So far, Waring estimates he has spent about $100,000 developing the suit, most of it his own money.
He appears remarkably calm, considering.
“I try not to get too excited,” he says. “If you get too excited, you could make a mistake.” A lesson he learned in 1984, he says, when he competed in Olympic time trials.
“I lost my head — I forgot to shave down the morning before the race. Then I managed to rip my big toenail off right before the time trials for the 100 m freestyle.”
Unlike the suit he designed, Waring himself never made it to the Olympics.