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Under Armour/Lockheed Suit Blamed For US Skating Performance
Koreantoast writes "The United States' surprisingly poor performance in speedskating, despite strong performances in recent World Cup events, has been blamed in part on an untested speedskating suit. The Mach 39, designed through a joint venture between Under Armour and Lockheed Martin, was supposed to provide Team USA with a high tech advantage, using advanced fluid dynamic models and a dimpled surface to disrupt air flow and improve comfort. Instead, performances have been disastrous thus far, with athletes going as far as modifying their suits at the Olympics to try and reverse their fortunes. The suits have caused enough concerns that U.S. Speedskating is taking the unusual step of seeking special dispensation from International Skating Union to ditch the high tech suits and switch back to their old uniforms. Teams are normally required to keep the same equipment through the entire Games. Insert jokes and comparisons to Lockheed's more famous product, the JSF, here."
Still, no one cared.
and a kite
Who the hell goes to the Olympics with untested gear, just hoping it will work?
Its too bad these games end up being more about your tech than your personal ability. Participants should all be required to use the same gear so that the gold is won based on personal merit.
...perhaps other countries just have better made and tested suits.
Trolling is a art,
Michel Mulder, who led a Dutch sweep of the medals in the men’s 500, offered another explanation.
“It could also be,” he said of the Americans, “that they were just outclassed here.”
... are just better skaters. With or without suit. Live with it.
It's all money, money, money. Corporate, corporate, corporate. The tickets are expensive, the travel murderous on the pocket and many seats are taken by corporate people who never show up. Then we get to the ugly bits about technology, so and so has a suit built by some high tech company of Unobtanium fibres and they are going up against Joe Somebody from Outer Slobovia, who is wearing whatever was on the rack at the local sport shop.
It's like cheering on millionaires and then getting your blood in a boil when you think someone cheated them.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Everybody was able to see them!
Have the athletes skate in the nude, just like they did in the ancient winter olympics.
They deserve no medals.
Now it is obvious, we had the russians in mind at least since the 70's.
what a laugh. not as funny as rosie o'donnel. or the beta.
What? No, fuck you. You tried to leverage a technological advantage and you failed. Suck it up.
I read the articles, and what's missing is the actual times.
The articles say they're slower than the other competitors, but what I'm curious about is this: are the USA skaters posting slower times in the suits than they did wearing other suits? If not, then it isn't the suits.
I know I could spend some time researching this on the Internet, but I'm feeling as lazy as the reporters that wrote the original article.
I tend to agree. The whole issue with the suits sounds more like superstition than anything else.
I can see the fnords!
You go into a major competition in a suit you haven't used at all? Who's completely jackass idea was that? The same guy who wrote the test plan for the Obamacare website?
Ooooo, SNAP.
That's gotta hurt.
Heaven forbid that someone else in the world was just better and won legitimately. No, there has to be something to blame for the loss.
For every winner of gold, there are dozens who go home with nothing. Maybe it's just your turn to be the ones who go home empty handed.
It does happen.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Sounds like they were trying to get an advantage with better gear, and it turned into a disadvantage. What, do you only want the good parts of having non-equivalent gear, and not the bad?
Seems like we should look into standardizing the gear across competitors-- if not, doesnt seem like theres much room for complaining.
I agree that situations where a technology that is unavailable to everyone can make things unfair and less exciting. The problem with requiring everyone to use the same gear, though, is that there are variables that have to be able to be accounted for. For instance, in cycling one major decision is which gears you put on your bike for a given race. Some people are better with bigger gears, and some smaller gears. Forcing everyone to use the same ones would put people at a disadvantage. Similarly with cross-country skiing, the specifics of how skis are waxed have a lot to do with snow conditions. Especially in races where participants start at different times, each racer need to be able to make that decision on their own. There's certainly a difference when everyone *could* wax their skis the same, though, and proprietary tech. But if I suddenly come up with a new way of waxing that seems better, using the same tools and the same wax, do I suddenly have to tell everyone? Most people, I think, would say no. So it gets hard to draw the line between innovation and unfairness.
It's not about pitting the best athletes in the world against one another in a competitive sport, it's all about money and power.
It's a triumph of the corporate spirit.
-SS "Teach the ignorant, care for the dumb, and punish the stupid."
"These suits are effectively meeting the aggressive operational challenges presented in Sochi."
Meanwhile, a congressional appropriations bill to purchase 2.5 million suits for "combat personnel enhancement" was passed late last night without debate.
...since unrestricted garnishing doesn't seem to be particularly fair.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Americans are very F A T and quite poor at sport.
The US has won 1063 gold medals at the Summer Olympics. The next highest existing country has won 245.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-time_Olympic_Games_medal_table
Michel Mulder, who led a Dutch sweep of the medals in the men’s 500, offered another explanation.
“It could also be,” he said of the Americans, “that they were just outclassed here.”
The issue is that these same Americans have been winning races against the same competitors over the last two years. Brittany Bowe is a world record holder, but came in 8th this week.
To the American athlete's credit, they have been downplaying the suit's impact and giving credit to the winners. The controversy is coming from the media.
Besides those numbers are for both winter and summer olympics combined, let's look into more details.
Sweden: 191 gold, 10 mln inhabitants
Hungary: 167 gold, 10 mln inhabitants
Switserland: 91 gold, 8 mln inhabitants
US: 1063 gold, +300 mln inhabitants
It is rude and unnecessary to call Americans fat and poor at sports, but in order to compare it with other nations one should not take grand totals.
(And yes, I hand-picked those examples but on the other hand I left out Norway with 5 mln inhabitants and 107 gold medals at the winter olympics vs US 87)
It was designed to be a terrible airplane just so the US could cripple the air force of its vassals by selling them an overpriced piece of shit. Since the US can afford to spend a lot of money for their military, they'll be able to replace their JSF with a decent fighter jet that they won't export while their vassals are left unable to defend their air space without the direct support of the USA.
I'll listen to the guy who designed the Dutch suits: Bert van der Tuuk, the designer of the Dutch Olympic team's suits, said Thursday he had tried a similar ventilation panel on the back of a prototype three years ago, but it slowed his skaters by letting in air and creating drag. "The suit was blowing itself up," he said. http://goo.gl/YaDlg8
They went live on an untested system? Who was in charge of the deployment of the suit? Kathleen Sebelius?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
There is at least one thing in the awful old world that I don't give a rat's ass about, and that is the Olympics.
Divide that by the number of inhabitants in each country, will you?
1063 / 317M = 3.35
245 / 63M = 3.88
Oh oh oh
Captcha : 'retarded'
(seriously, not lying : proof!)
Right before the Olympics started, I read an article that referred to this exact suit and mentioned that it was going to give the Americans an unfair advantage. Lesson learned here? Spend less money on marketing (propaganda) and more money on product testing.
Is anyone else sick of being lied to and misdirected on a regular basis? "Best speed skating suit ever developed!" "Oh, wait. Just kidding!"
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.c...
Our economy is right and truly fucked at this point. The company that previously brought us the SR-71 has so many idle engineers sitting around that all they can do is waste (presumably) millions of dollars on a failure. Am I really to believe Obama and our "business leaders" that America does not have enough engineering talent? Here is an idea. How about instead of wasting their time on designing speed skating suits, they find them some productive projects to work on?
But, surely the athletes trained in these suits, right? I mean, would you show up to something like the Olympics in gear that's only been tested in a wind tunnel?
If they were going to be slower in them, you'd think that would be fairly obvious in practice.
Suits or no suits, they still didn't beat the other teams. So, you pretty much have to give them credit for actually winning.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Just fine tune a few parameters and 3D print a new suit.
If all Americans are "FAT and quite poor at sport", it shouldn't matter how many people live here.
So, you pretty much have to give them credit for actually winning.
No. You could blame the suits like the media are doing.
It may well be the fault of the suits. They still didn't win.
And belly aching that your fancy high tech suits didn't work doesn't change anything.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
At that level, placebo effect plays an important, often deciding role, as these are people who push human body to the very limits. That's why they use anything from snake oil to kinesio tape to tap into the "110% potential" as the trainers often call it.
In this case, it may have been that one or two athletes performed badly at the start of the games while wearing these suits, and then blamed the suits along their peers, causing negative placebo effect. In other words skaters started to believe that suits are in fact slowing them down, which affected them.
It does matter because all those tax dollars buys you your foreign athletes.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Good enough for moses' men.
Men married little girls back then. Adorable little girls.
So does this mean the suits would get all the credit if they won?
Under Armour developed the skintight aerodynamic suit for the Sochi Games and it was pretested for specific conditions
Except for having a boner.
Perhaps the Dutch are better?
Anybody know what division of LM was involved in the design?
That we train and then send home to compete for their home country? Those foreign athletes? How exactly do they raise our medal count?
If someone handed me one of those... I'd try a run with and without and compare the times.
If the times were better or the same then I'd allow the suit. If it slowed me at all then obviously it isn't acceptable.
If you wanted to be especially scientific about it then you'd do a series of trials so you could average them.
Regardless... this is a huge black eye for team USA. Kindly test something before implementing it, asshats.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
They should hold an international competition and give out medals for getting people out of poverty.
As they only had the suits for a month, they most likely only trained against other people wearing the suits.
In theory, the games are supposed to be tests of the athlete's skills. Everyone's gear should be identical.
No doubt they wrote a bill that said exactly what L-Mart and UA were to do together and exactly how it would be built, along with input from companies based in China. That makes far more sense since it is what they did on the Space Launch System (SLS) along with the JSF.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Training for a month is not the same as competing in them. Very subtle differences in joint movement, in airfflow, and in resistance to airflow can make a few milliseconds difference for people performing at their physical best, with the all-out effort necessary for a championship run. You don't usually exert quite that much effort for training runs in the last month, especially if you don't want an accident or a strained joint to hurt your once in a lifetime performance.
Its too bad these games end up being more about your tech than your personal ability.
I prefer to look at it like this - it's AMAZING that at the top level of a sport like speed skating that simple material choices really the main difference between most competitors. You can tell they are running right at the edge of human ability when a suit makes the difference between a medal and relative failure.
It's also amazing from a different angle, the advances in material science that have occurred to make these suits. The Olympics have always seemed like a giant sinkhole for money but you have to think the R&D for stuff like these suits comes out in a variety of other products eventually.
Well, perhaps not THESE suits... :-)
But failure is the best teacher, so I'll bet they have learned a lot of good things not to do from this!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The Dutch have 12 medals in speed skating. That's more than a coincidence and clothing cannot account for all that. This is their sport, they have a great crop of young competitors and Sochi is at sea level too.
If different suits gives our team more confidence - great - this is about the sport and the competitors, not Under Armor and Locheed.
Being from Chicago I'm a big Shani Davis fan. We're disappointed so far but let's see what happens in the 1500 meter race tomorrow.
Greed is the root of all evil.
In my opinion the US skaters are just looking for a scapegoat. The truth is much simpler, us Dutchies are completely and utterly dominating the speed-skating competition at the Olympics.
A good suit is vs a bad suit just gives you a very very marginal advantage, the rest is training and professionalism. It's not just the US that is being squashed right now, each and every country competing in speedskating is getting a good ass-kicking. ;-)
Life starts at the end of your comfort zone.
Sounds like they need a little piece of duct (500 MPH) tape to put over the vent!
If the music industry is acting as a cartel towards new technology, then this could be a legal argument made against this whole scene.
Then again, maybe we shouldn't bring legal into this, and lets just pirate the hell out of it.
Either way, we win and you lose music industry. Why don't you see it this way?
If Lockheed was involved, since when does it matter if it works? Congress will likely push the USAF to start issuing these suits to airmen.
vi? Who's that?
Except, the human forms at the olympics are not the fat, neckbearded types who sit around commenting on slashdot all day; the olympians are a collection of the fittest bodies the world has to offer. Nobody is going to have problems with those bodies.
And for your own body at nudist camps: I've been to a few nude resorts, and the main denominator of the attendees is their acceptance for all sorts of human forms. Of course there will be a couple pervs hanging around that you'll shock with your unbleached anus and your lack of a mutant monster cock, but the rest of us will gladly go naked ski-jumping with you.
The design for the Canadian speedskating uniforms didn't use computational fluid dynamics. They just selected a wide range of materials (all still had to be cut-proof), and tested them in a wind tunnel (the most laminar flow won).
very useful article
Those numbers can be a bit deceiving. For example The Soviet union win 1204 winter Olympic medals. It looks like the would be second to the Us's 2653 but wait a minute. The Soviet Union only participated in 18 games while the US participated in 47 games. On a per games basis the US won 56.4 per games while the Soviet Union won 66.9 per games. It looks to me that the Soviet Union won 19% more medals per game than the US
If you look at just golds it comes out to 22.6/games for the US and 26.3/per games for the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union winning 10% more golds per games than the US
Grand totals are misleading when countries participated a different number of times.
A lot of societies still doesn't seem to think it's something wrong with marriage at 15.
That doesn't mean it's not wrong. Perspective change with ideas and group dynamics too.
whst they mean is that they screwed up their drugs regime and have shown what a load of mediocre crap they actualy are. the only way yanks ever win at ANYTHING is by CHEATING.
Back in the late 70's my manager hit me with a statement that has stood the test of time...
"If it isn't tested, it doesn't work".
He was originally talking about gate array programming but it seems to hold for any design discipline.
Next time try furry suits, trust me it will work for sure!
Many Olympic sports have "a single country cannot send more than X athletes to compete in this sport" rule. So a pure medals per capita analysis may be misleading.
The Americans were only ever good at the sprint distances. The long distances have been dominated by the Dutch for a long time. Considering the Dutch medal sweep, in all distances, the most likely explanation, is that the Dutch have been doing something very right, rather than the Americans doing something wrong.
vote_on_us_proposal (member_country string) // also known as a snowballs chance in Sochi
{ if (member_country == 'USA') then return 'YES' else return 'NO';}
...not the [suits] you might want or wish to have at a later time."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter Schlockheed
How does having a high tech suit that confers a high tech advantage differ from taking drugs that confer a medical ( high tech ) advantage ? If you're judging athletes to determine the most skilled, fastest, etc. then you should judge them on a level playing field.
when I 1st read the headline my initial assumption was that this was a bullshit patent lawsuit that was keeping team USA from using superior equipment.
that about sums up the state of IP law these days...
Tougher competition can certainly explain part of it. The Dutch have lots of innovation and competition in training techniques, and the pay off is clearly visible at the 500m, which was always the one distance we totally sucked at. But then you'd expect the American world record holder in 4th place, not 8th.
You can usually still send enough athletes to take all the medals if you're that good. Medals per capita is not meaningless, but you do need to make sure you've got a really good competition to select those athletes. (And it helps if they use the same tech in that selection as they'll be using in the final event; some take to it better than others.)
It's a poor craftsman who blames his tools.
and painful
Today the Americans skated the 1500 meter in their old suit. With a 7th place, Brain Hansen was the best American. Can we conclude it wasn't the suit?
I'm not surprised the culprit is Lockheed Martin (is the Rockefeller family still the largest shareholder of that crockfest arms dealer?)!
Just looking at the skaters are bent double and how the design appears to act like an air scoop, breaking their performance is soooo frigging obvious, they should have tossed it without any testing, but to think those damnable incompetent jackasses didn't even bother to test it, speaks volumes about the corruption sooooo pervasive in the arms industry, funded by the American taxpayer, who can't even afford to feed their family today!
Look at the results of the 1500 meter race for women, which concluded only moments ago.
Gold medal is for the Dutch. Silver is for the Dutch. Bronze, yes, also for the Dutch. Fourth place? Yes, Dutch again.
Those gals can skate. The gold medal winner skated an Olympic Record as well.
There is no competition here.
BB's world record was set on the Salt Lake City track, which is at 4,675 feet (1,425 m). BB is a sprinter, an allrounder who has a PB 1 seconds slower set on a sea level track will beat her with a margin of several seconds on a lowland track like Sochi. Compared to Salt Lake City, the Sochi track is like having to do an additional lap after your 1000m, something that will kill a high altitude sprinter, but a lowlands allrounder can properly deal with.
In short, calling in BB's world record is comparing apples to oranges. None of the experts I heard really expected her to score a medal.
Easy fix. All nations use the same uniforms. They can have their own logos and such, base materials and construction should all be the same. No special coatings, waxes, oils.... just compete fairly. Let the best man win.
The JSF is a joint-services program. Congress should be pushing for *all* armed forces to wears these suits.
Well, at least he's not being a poor winner! I would hope Dutch mothers taught their children that, but I have no personal experience with Dutch parenting skills.
so, uss suits failed, that is obvious. skaters changed the suits yet failed again to even pull into anything above 7th? the dutch called the suits garbage bags, rightly so. was nothing more than flashy UA knock-off of old technology that was tested and failed in late 90's,and ultimately abandoned.so, why did uss decide to resurrect an old technology without really knowing the outcome here? what is not so obvious, and presents another failure, is that uss ditched it's longtime skate equipment technician, replacing many years experience and engineering knowledge with what amounts to wanna-be hacks (possessing no engineering background, technical eduction, or special skills in equipment), and uss makes this change only a few weeks before the games? wondering how much uss spent in sigma space corp's resurrection of an already failed skate polishing system polish, yet another fail. saw the new uss equipment technicians touting to the world how proud they are to have been part in implementation of the suits & sharpening technologies used in sochi... wonder now if they are proud of f'ing it up for the skaters.