Deanna Panting has been working with technical sport fabrics for so long that she can blow a puff of air through a new sample and get a rough idea of its aerodynamic properties.
But on this day in October, a month before the start of the all-important Olympic ski season, she’s at the wind tunnel in Oshawa to see how her fabrics perform in this far more scientific environment.
This is one of the last steps in a long process that started with an idea in the Calgary offices of her company, Qwixskinz, then went through early testing in a lab at the University of British Columbia and a factory in northern Italy.
Now, the newly designed race suits are ready for Erik Guay and Manny Osborne-Paradis, two of Canada’s biggest Olympic hopes in alpine skiing, to try on for final testing.
Alpine Canada hopes these new suits, made of an aerodynamic three-layer fabric, will form the final piece of a winning puzzle and help Canadian skiers step on the podium in Pyeongchang, South Korea, in February.
The ACE Climatic Wind Tunnel at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology is a cavernous room capable of simulating extreme weather with wind speeds up to 300 km/h and temperatures down to -40C.
Its upper limits aren’t needed for ski testing: it’s colder in Pyeongchang than it was in balmy Sochi but not -40C cold, and this test will top out at 130 km/h.
Osborne-Paradis clips into the skis bolted to a platform in the middle of the wind tunnel. He gets into his race tuck and adjusts his hands — an inch up or down, into his body or away from it — looking for the most aerodynamic position.
The team is here to test the new Olympic and World Cup suits for performance and custom fit on athletes.
How does the Olympic suit perform in high humidity, which is what the team expects to find in South Korea? Is it more aerodynamic to wear the airbag back protector beneath or on top of the undersuit, which forms an integral piece of the package?
These answers come in grams of drag — essentially the force pushing against the skiers, which reduces their maximum speed.
The computers tally the data for Panting and her team but, perhaps just as important, it’s also displayed on a panel in the tunnel where the skiers can see it. In a sport where hundredths of a second determine podium finishes, athletes need to be confident that they have every possible advantage.
“At 130 km/h we’re at 17,800 grams, and with your hands somewhere else you’re at 17,200 grams,” Osborne-Paradis says. “Whatever that means, I don’t know, but I know that it’s less drag, 600 less. That can be a couple hundredths of a second, it really can be.”
He knows exactly what a difference that can make.
At the 2017 world championships he won bronze in super-giant slalom and was only 0.06 seconds from picking up silver. Guay, his teammate, was the gold medallist in that race.
And at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, Guay produced Canada’s best result with his fifth-place finish in super-G, a mere 0.03 seconds off the podium.
To Panting, it was a problem that could be solved.
“If we improved his drag by only two per cent over 100 metres of that course, he would have won a medal,” Panting says. “I think I almost made Erik cry when I told him that.”
If Guay had today’s race suit — which October testing showed to have a two-per-cent benefit — back in 2010, Panting believes he would have won an Olympic medal on home soil.
“They’re a faster fabric and faster cut,” she says.
But what-ifs don’t amount to much in sport and she knows that from her own experience. Panting was a Canadian skeleton slider on the World Cup team for eight years until she retired in 2005.
The key to winning in skeleton is a lightning-fast start and maintaining the fastest line down the course. That usually comes with the least amount of steering and is just barely on the right side of being in control.
Now Panting’s job is to ride a similarly hard-to-find line, but this time it’s just on the right side of legal.
“Back in the 1980s, the time of the Crazy Canucks, they were wearing vinyl-coated Lycra. There was zero air permeability and when they crashed they would speed up on the ice, so it became a safety issue,” Panting says.
FIS, the international governing body for skiing, introduced rules for how suits must be made and dictated that some air has to pass through the suits to slow down skiers. Panting’s job is to make a race suit that is as fast as possible within the rules.
Suits must have an air permeability rating of 30 litres per m2/sec, which is a technical way of saying some air must pass through the material and there’s a special testing machine to make they comply.
Panting explains it more simply with her low-tech test for fabrics.
“If you put your mouth to the fabric and it’s like Saran Wrap, that’s zero air permeability. If you can blow some air through, it’s about a 30. If you can blow a lot of air through, it’s way above that,” she says.
Custom suits for elite skiers are made so close to the line that teams have their own machines to test them the night before a race to make sure they’ll pass. If they don’t, coaches and athletes will stretch out the fabric until they do.
This is where Panting starts to get creative.
Canada’s suit for speed skiing is made of two parts: a race suit and an undersuit. Both have tiny holes to create the permeability FIS requires.
“But if you put them together and the holes are not matching up, then you’re not at 30 anymore,” Panting says with a smile.
That’s legal.
Individually the pieces have to hit the 30 mark; the combined result doesn’t. But achieving that takes some impressive custom fitting.
That’s one way to achieve a subtle speed advantage, but given all the advances in technical fabrics since the rule was introduced, Panting thinks there are ways to gain even bigger advantages.
In Canada’s suits she’s using textured fabrics — like the dimpled surface on a golf ball — to manipulate airflow and reduce drag. Smoke is often used in a wind tunnel to show how aerodynamics work, and the desired effect is to have the smoke curve around the body rather than trail off quickly into turbulent air.
She’s here to test all of this and perfect the fit. Too tight or too loose and the suits will lose some of their aerodynamic properties. Even a wrinkle in the fabric can interrupt the airflow and create drag that the computer can pick up.
They want a smooth surface. But again, it’s a fine line. They don’t want to stretch the suit to the point that it becomes flat and loses the aerodynamic benefit from its texture.
When these suits are overstretched they don’t bounce back the way store-bought tights do and their performance will drop. That’s why someone at the top level in a major race such as at the Olympics will only compete in a speed suit once before it gets handed down to the development team. That means there’s no room for superstitions, or keeping a suit that worked last time for the next race.
“A lucky suit is a new suit and you’re lucky to have it,” Osborne-Paradis says, laughing. “This is 100 per cent definitely the difference between winning and not winning.”
He and Guay were wearing the specialized fabric that’s going into the 2018 Olympic suits when they hit the podium three times at the world championships this past February, and that’s given the team a lot of confidence in the design.
“There are a lot of variables involved and at the end of the day the athlete still had to perform, but it is one of the things that, when it is perfected, enables an athlete to go faster,” Panting says.
After two years of work already put into the fabric and design, she’s still in the process of finalizing the fit of the race suits the skiers will wear in Pyeongchang come February.
“Every Olympics I think there might be a whole lot of naked athletes,” she says, referring to the just-in-time production schedule they work on.
She’ll fly to Europe to double-check the fit with the men’s team on Jan. 9 — a month before racers will need them at the Olympics — while it’s competing in Wengen, Switzerland. Only then will the factory in Italy produce the Olympic suits, and they’ll only have two weeks instead of the normal production timeline of two months.
“There’s nothing normal about the Olympic year and Olympic race suits,” Panting says.
It has to be last minute because if an athlete gains or loses weight the suit won’t fit properly, and as little as a quarter of an inch makes a difference.
“This is about hundredths of a second and perfecting things. Just like the athletes are fine-tuning themselves, that’s what we’re doing with the suits,” she says.
The Olympic suit, which carries different logos, is also being cut slightly differently than the World Cup versions they’ve been using this season because of the higher humidity the team expects to find in South Korea.
If fabric gets saturated with moisture it has a tendency to relax, a bit like a sweater when it gets wet. So, they’re taking into account how the suit will react to the environment they’re mostly likely to encounter on race day.
It’s an incredibly detailed level of science and technology that’s become part and parcel of this classic daredevil sport.
“It’s a must,” says Martin Rufener, the Canadian alpine team’s athletic director.
Canada’s budget for technological development pales when compared to Austria or Switzerland, but Rufener thinks Canada still has some of the best equipment and suits.
“We got to the world championships and we got three medals with the speed suits, so I think we are at a high, high level,” he says. “Can this give you the last thing to be on the podium? Yes, but all the other parts have to be on the highest level as well. We have a chance with all the work we have done.”
Rufener trusts the science and what the monitors say about the aerodynamic properties of the Olympic suits, but what matters just as much is that his skiers do, too.
“On the men’s side you have maybe 30 athletes — 20 for sure — which each week can be on the podium, so it’s hundredths. You want to make sure they trust what you have for them to put on,” he said.
“That’s the most important thing, that these guys believe that what they have on their body is fast.”