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It's a swimsuit so revolutionary that one athlete has claimed that it makes you feel like you're "swimming downhill". And, since it was launched in February, 38 world records have been broken by swimmers wearing it.
Little wonder, then, that Olympic swimming teams are now falling over themselves to ditch their sponsors in order to get Speedo's LZR Racer swimsuit in the run-up to Beijing.
So what's all the fuss about? Would those records have been broken if a different suit had been worn? According to Speedo it's more than just hype. The suit took nearly four years to develop and involved enlisting the help of Nasa and a technique called computational fluid dynamics, says Jason Rance, head of Speedo's Aqualab, the company's global research and development facility.
He says the swimsuit can reduce drag by up to 24 per cent. Existing all-over bodysuits, which have been used in competition swimming for 15 years, are all designed to reduce drag.
One popular and somewhat counter-intuitive way of doing this is to engineer the surface so that it is rough not smooth. This has the effect of creating a small amount of turbulence in the thin layer of water flowing close to the material's surface.
The aim here is to prevent water from passing over it evenly, and so clinging to it - the same principle behind the dimples in golf balls and why the hulls of ships are rough, according to Mike Caine, a sports technology institute director.
But the LZR does something different, says Rance. It is made up of two types of material, one woven and coated with water repellant, the other an extremely smooth polyurethane membrane. Both are engineered to create very little friction when water flows over it.
Another feature of the LZR is compression: it is designed to hug the body 70 times tighter than other suits.
This has the effect of squashing the body together like a corset to make it more streamlined. "You're not going to want to wear it at the beach," says Rance. But for athletes the benefits appear to outweigh how uncomfortable it might be.
The controversy, however, is just the latest to hit the world of sport, according to Rebecca Lodwig, swimming co-ordinator and Elspeth Lilburne, head coach at St Christopher's School who recently staged the successful open swimming championships in the kingdom.
In elite sporting competitions, participants are advancing through evolving training and coaching techniques, diet and nutritional knowledge and the ever-evolving array of equipment available. For instance, in tennis, the progression from wooden to aluminum rackets, and eventually to graphite ones which are used today, has seen an increase in serving speed and a heightened level of play. This, at the time, was considered a major controversy within the sport.
Logwig added: "To excel in the competitive swimming arena people have to embrace new initiatives and ideas. Over the years swimsuit designers have used various materials ranging from wool in the early 20th Century to spandex in the 1930s, from Lycra in the 1950s to neoprene in the 1980s, to the fast-skin suit developed by Speedo in the year 2000.
"Now the new Speeedo LZR racer suit is the next progression in materials. Also, an-ever changing focus on shape and style has evolved from a full body suit to a traditional style costume (maillot) for women and briefs for men.
"This cycle has now returned to the full body suit for competitive swimming.
"To be at the top of your game, a swim suit alone might not hold the key to success. As every athlete knows winning comes from hard work, training conscientiously, mental focus, competitive spirit, love of the sport etc ... but having the latest revolutionary design in clothing would put you ahead of others still using the older style."
But if the suit really does work, doesn't this amount to an unfair advantage? "It's clearly not cheating because it doesn't break any of the rules," says Caine. It's no worse than one athlete training with a better exercise machine than another, he says.
Even so, for the have-not swimmers it may amount to little more than technological doping.
