The Hungarian Swimming Federation recently extended its cooperation with the renowned international sportswear manufacturer Arena, which held a "European tour" together with all the sponsored national swimming federations in early spring.
Although there have been similar racing suit test programs in the past for our national swimmers at the Duna Arena, which we organized every 2 or 3 years, we never had the pleasure to welcome such a large delegation from the Arena headquarters. The eight-member team, led by Product Development Director Greg Steyger and Sports Marketing Manager David Maitre, already visited the Swedish, Dutch, Swiss and Italian national teams and now they were curious to learn what feedback the Hungarian swimmers would give about the racing suit prototypes and about other equipment planned to be launched as of 2026.
Greg Steyger briefly explained Arena’s philosophy in the following way: “We have been working with athletes for many years, and our number one objective has always been to make swimmers as fast as possible in the pool”, he said. “There are basically two factors to consider: the shape of the body (form drag) and the surface area of the body that comes into contact with the water (surface drag). The latter only accounts for less than ten percent of the speed, so we focus primarily on how the body glides through the water. The most effective way to do this is to compress the body with a racing suit that shapes it to move as quickly as possible. It depends on a lot of things to make this work ideal – too much compression can also have a negative effect on the athlete, so it needs to be perfectly fine-tuned so that the suit only applies pressure to those muscle groups and only to the extent that it clearly helps the swimmer. That’s why we organize such meetings with the athletes, as if they don’t say that they would wear the suit tomorrow at a competition, then we have not done our job yet”.
On behalf of Swim Team Hungary, many Olympians, World and European Championship medalists, and a few more young talents who are already among the best in their age group at European level shared their opinions. On behalf of Arena and the future generations of swimmers (who will get the chance to swim in racing suits that will have been fine-tuned as per these observations), we would like to thank Bettina Fábián, Vivien Jackl, Ajna Késely, Petra Senánszky, Panna Ugrai, as well as Dávid Betlehem, Richárd Márton, Nándor Németh, Kristóf Rasovszky, Gábor Zombori and their coaches. Kudos to our open water trio, who, after the racing suit test even performed a regular training session as well, as they were still preparing for the World Aquatics Open Water Swimming World Cup in Ibiza.
We eagerly await the finalized racing suit models of the 2026 collections, which next to the many training sessions, will hopefully contribute to the speed improvement of our swimmers.
