By Amy Shipley

Given that Ariana Kukors won her first world title and set a pair of world records this past summer, one might think her long-time coach Sean Hutchison would simply marvel at her technique and not touch a thing.

One would be completely wrong.

Hutchison, who begins coaching at the newest U.S. Olympic Committee swimming training center in Fullerton, Calif., next week, treated the influx of polyurethane suits over the last 18 months not as a nuisance but as an invitation for painstaking analysis and thoughtful adaptation.

He and Kukors tested the suits weekly in practices, studied their effects on video and strategically altered her stroke to maximize the high-tech benefits.

“The more I watched, the more I felt like it’s not regular swimming,” said Hutchison, who attended Centennial High. “It’s not the same as swimming without them.”

Now, with Kukors at the top of her sport — but the suits scheduled to be replaced by textile, knee-to-neck suits in January — Hutchison figures there is much more work to be done.

Or, perhaps, un-done.

That, he hopes, won’t be a problem.

“I think the un-doing is easy; when you go back to something you knew how to do previously, it’s just a matter of getting the changes right,” he said.

Kukors made a number of adjustments to take advantage of the new technology, she and Hutchison said. Two of the simplest had to do with her head position and leg-action on her breaststroke.

It didn’t take great insight to notice that the impermeable suits worked as pure flotation aids, Hutchison said, helping swimmers keep their feet up with less effort. That, in turn, allowed Kukors to hold her head higher without losing that body position. And the high head, Hutchison realized, provided a significant strength boost to her stroke.

How? By allowing her to utilize her pectoral muscles more fully. (To make the scientific theory more plain, he said, consider how a person executes pull-ups when fatigued — by throwing the head back to get more power from the pecs).

Another change came in the tempo of Kukors’s breaststroke kick — she slowed it down to take advantage of the speed at which she could move with her legs closed. Particularly with the Jaked suit, which Kukors wore at the world championships, Kukors seemed to be able to glide faster and longer underwater.

“I think the majority of swimmers and coaches didn’t make any changes and either got lucky and got a big benefit or got unlucky and got no benefit,” Hutchison said. “We tried to be proactive and learn what works with the suits.”

At the world championships in Rome, Kukors set, and re-set, the world record in the 200-meter individual medley. She also won the gold medal in that event as she dropped more than four seconds from her previous best time from early in 2008.

But, thanks to the high-tech suits, she will have to establish herself as one of her sport’s biggest stars all over again next year. Some say Kukors and others who made major strides in the last year benefited from the new technology, but the mere suggestion can feel like an accusation to the swimmers themselves.

“Of course, the suits made us all go quite a bit faster than we would have normally gone; there’s no use denying that,” she said by phone recently. “With all the suit controversy, I feel like I have a lot more to prove.”

Hutchison described Kukors as the world’s most advanced female in the individual medley in terms of the quality of all four of her strokes. And he says she has the best breaststroke kick by far.

Training at Hutchison’s new post-collegiate training site at the Fullerton Aquatics Sports Team (FAST), Kukors will be able to readily gauge her progress in the old suits, as she will be training alongside Katie Hoff, the former individual medley world-record holder who decided to move from the North Baltimore Aquatic Club to FAST this fall.

“We’re definitely going to go back and make some stroke changes,” Kukors said. “I like change. Change is good. My plan is to set my best times to what they were before the suit era.”

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