Tested in a Nasa wind tunnel and moulded for the human body from the lightest and tightest materials, the original Speedo LZR Racer swimsuit caused a sensation when it was launched four years ago.
But while its hydrodynamic, skin-tight design was a game-changer for front-crawlers and back-strokers, it was a pain in the proverbial for museum professionals.
“I’ve put some clothes on mannequins in my time but two of us struggled for hours and simply couldn’t get this suit to go on,” says Rosemary Harden, the manager of the Fashion Museum in Bath.
“This was a completely different type of ‘give’; it just carried on stretching in every direction.”
After world records tumbled at the Beijing Olympics, the sport’s ruling body eventually banned the all-body suit. But a compromise was reached over a revised design and, luckily for Harden and her team, the new suit was a relative doddle when it came to dressing a dummy in a swimming costume.
And so the later LZR has taken its place in the line-up for the Sport and Fashion exhibition, the museum’s celebration of the park, pool and pitch-to-prêt-à-porter crossover timed for the final preparations for London 2012.
Alongside the replica shirts, casual tops and hip-hop trainers, the show features 18th-century ladies’ riding jackets – the forerunner of today’s business suit – a footballer’s shirt from the early 1900s, as well as Stella McCartney’s designs for Adidas and Victoria Beckham’s haute couture hoodies.
It’s the story of the pursuit of the perfect kit to help improve the performance of athletes while also assisting the less exercised to cut a dash on the high street.
“The driver behind the show was obviously a desire to play a part in the Olympics but it was also a chance for us to perhaps attract some men through the door and to show some of the historic objects we have that would otherwise not see the light of day,” says Harden.
Another watery sporting icon has pride of place at Ironbridge Gorge Museums’ Enginuity design centre. Team GB’s gold medal-winning eight rowing boat from the Sydney Olympics, on display as part of the Science of Sport exhibition, is an inspiring piece of equipment in its own right but it also helps illustrate how changing technologies have forged world records and personal bests.
The show is part of a packed programme of Olympicthemed events at the Shropshire site that also includes a day of communal games at Blists Hill Victorian Town.
“We’re doing so much because we’re a tourist-driven museum and we’re close to Much Wenlock, the traditional birthplace of the modern Olympic movement,” says Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust chief executive Steve Miller.
“I think it’s important to give people the chance to have their own 2012 moment. There obviously has been criticism about everything being concentrated on London so this is a way of drumming up regional enthusiasm.”
Audience participation events include Games and Me, in which digital trickery enables punters to measure the speed of their kicked footballs and to take on Usain Bolt over a virtual 100 metres. “These events are attracting new audiences and give our traditional visitors something new,” adds Miller.
“We are also making use of our remarkable sporting archive, photographs and memorabilia relating to local heroes such as Captain Matthew Webb, the first man to swim the Channel, and Ironbridge boy Billy Wright, who earned 110 England football caps and was never booked.”
Overall, the Cultural Olympiad has come under fire for being complicated and unfocused, with its festivals within festivals. Many of the events centre on contemporary art, although it’s often difficult to see how they relate to the Olympics, beyond bearing its logo.
As a result, some commentators, such as Jonathan Jones in the Guardian, have wondered how the London 2012 festival, part of the Cultural Olympiad, “connects in any interesting way with the Olympics”.
This has not been a problem for those museums and galleries that have focused their activities on sport, and they often seem to have benefited from this tighter remit. Many Olympic-themed events in museums were kickstarted by the Our Sporting Life (OSL) programme.
It has helped more than 100 institutions to celebrate Britain as the birthplace of modern sport by encouraging communities around the UK to laud their own local legends. OSL was itself the brainchild of the Sports Heritage Network, a group created in 2003 to promote sports collections. Many people who work with this type of material believe the subject has not been taken seriously.
“We felt for a long time that the wider museum sector wasn’t listening enough to our expertise and experiences, yet we face the same challenges,” says Sports Heritage Network chairman Kevin Moore, who is also the director of the National Football Museum, which is opening in Manchester this July.
“There seem to be issues about sport and culture in British society that they don’t have, for example, in North America. There’s no problem with a sports museum over there being seen as a cultural attraction but we seem to have difficulty with it.”
Moore hails the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum’s commendation in the 2008 European Museum of the Year award as evidence of a sports attraction proving to be just as enjoyable a visitor experience as an art gallery.
“This division between sport and culture is partly a class issue,” adds Moore. “Why, for example, aren’t there museums dedicated to rugby league and boxing?”
He says that sport-based collections attract greater numbers of the kinds of people who don’t normally go to museums, such as ethnic minorities and those from the C2, D and E social classes.
There are now plans to extend the Our Sporting Life programme to take in future events such as the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow and the Rugby World Cup in 2015.
“Through OSL, a lot of museums have discovered new audiences, opportunities, volunteers, objects and – above all – some truly great links to their communities and schools,” says Paul Mainds, chairman of the OSL steering committee.
Through his day job as chief executive of the River & Rowing Museum, Henley-on-Thames, Mainds has seen for himself the blossoming enthusiasm for sport as his museum hosts events to celebrate the Olympic regattas of 1908 and 1948, which were held in the town.
“If you go back 20 or 30 years, the image of rowing was purely that of a university sport carried out by people in striped blazers,” Mainds says.
“It was a bit posh, all Boat Race and royal regattas. But Steve Redgrave almost single-handedly changed it into an inclusive sport. He’s not just an iconic rower, he’s an iconic figure.
“We have seen for ourselves how spending some time with an Olympic medal-winning athlete is inspiring to visitors of all ages,” Mainds continues.
“Our job as museums is to make sure that inspiration is available to as many people as possible.” In comparison to Redgrave, Albert “Lal” White was a very different kind of sporting hero from a very different age, but his story is every bit as absorbing.
White was a steelworker and spare-time cyclist from Scunthorpe whose passion for pedalling drove him to win a silver medal in the team pursuit at the 1920 Antwerp Olympics.
When not on the track, White was known to race whippets through Scunthorpe town centre and was also reckoned to have constructed the first static bike, which he made from old washing machine mangles. He is now the figurehead of an exhibition at North Lincolnshire’s Normanby Hall Country Park.
“Lal White’s achievements as the region’s only Olympic medallist, the strong history of bicycle manufacturing in the area and Britain’s continuing success at Olympic cycling are the perfect theme for our Cultural Olympiad activities,” said John Briggs, the cabinet members for sport, leisure and culture at North Lincolnshire Council.
“There are some great stories to tell local people and visitors from further afield; the project has been led by young people and is inspired by our region’s collection.”
If you really want to make a cultural statement in 2012, however, there can be no better way than to transform your historic premises into an actual Olympic venue.
London 2012’s Cycling Time Trial events will take place on the roads around Hampton Court, Henry VIII’s pleasure palace where the once-athletic king proved his sporting prowess in events ranging from real tennis to hunting and hawking.
Staff at Historic Royal Palaces (HRP), which manages the property, have been given a crash course in the sport as well as the facts and figures of hosting an Olympic event, according to the head of visitor services David Hingley.
“We are going to have three different influxes – the world’s media on the palace green, the competitors, their teams and VIP members of the ‘Olympic family’ and spectators who we can tempt inside to see us while they’re here,” says Hingley.
There will be a cycle-powered cinema with some HRP staff volunteering to provide pedal power, displays provided by the National Cycle Collection from Powys in the courtyards, along with a circus and music recitals in the Great Hall.
“It’s certainly not every day that you get a worldwide audience and, like the nation as a whole, it’s up to us to make the most of it,” Hingley says.
John Holt is a freelance writer
Shauna Richardson’s Lionheart Project involves three gigantic crocheted lions touring the country in a specially made 16 metre-long illuminated glass case mounted on a flat-bed lorry. It started at Chatsworth House in May (to 10 June) and will arrive at the Natural History Museum, London (20 July to 10 September), in time for the Olympic Games. The idea is based on the old-style travelling menagerie shows.
Photographs of members of the Sierra Leone women’s boxing team feature in an exhibition at the International Slavery Museum, Liverpool. Women’s boxing will be an Olympic sport for the first time at London 2012 but a lack of funding is preventing the Sierra Leone team from attending.
Three new outdoor sculptures by British artist Tony Cragg are being displayed along Exhibition Road, South Kensington, during the London 2012 Festival, the culmination of the Cultural Olympiad. A number of indoor works will be on show at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Science Museum and Imperial College.
Posters designed by avantgarde artists for the infamous Munich Olympic Games of 1972 are to be shown at Monkwearmouth Station Museum in Sunderland. Artists represented include David Hockney, Serge Paliokov, Oskar Kokoschka, Allen Jones and Max Bill.
The exhibition consists of 19 of the 26 original posters and runs until 5 June. The huge posters, part of the museum’s collection, have undergone conservation to repair minor damage.
London’s National Portrait Gallery has commissioned photographers to take portraits of athletes and other key figures involved in the London Olympics. An exhibition of the works is touring the UK and recently left Cardiff to go on display in Edinburgh (1 June–8 July) before moving to Birmingham (13 July– 9 September).
But while its hydrodynamic, skin-tight design was a game-changer for front-crawlers and back-strokers, it was a pain in the proverbial for museum professionals.
“I’ve put some clothes on mannequins in my time but two of us struggled for hours and simply couldn’t get this suit to go on,” says Rosemary Harden, the manager of the Fashion Museum in Bath.
“This was a completely different type of ‘give’; it just carried on stretching in every direction.”
After world records tumbled at the Beijing Olympics, the sport’s ruling body eventually banned the all-body suit. But a compromise was reached over a revised design and, luckily for Harden and her team, the new suit was a relative doddle when it came to dressing a dummy in a swimming costume.
And so the later LZR has taken its place in the line-up for the Sport and Fashion exhibition, the museum’s celebration of the park, pool and pitch-to-prêt-à-porter crossover timed for the final preparations for London 2012.
Alongside the replica shirts, casual tops and hip-hop trainers, the show features 18th-century ladies’ riding jackets – the forerunner of today’s business suit – a footballer’s shirt from the early 1900s, as well as Stella McCartney’s designs for Adidas and Victoria Beckham’s haute couture hoodies.
It’s the story of the pursuit of the perfect kit to help improve the performance of athletes while also assisting the less exercised to cut a dash on the high street.
“The driver behind the show was obviously a desire to play a part in the Olympics but it was also a chance for us to perhaps attract some men through the door and to show some of the historic objects we have that would otherwise not see the light of day,” says Harden.
Another watery sporting icon has pride of place at Ironbridge Gorge Museums’ Enginuity design centre. Team GB’s gold medal-winning eight rowing boat from the Sydney Olympics, on display as part of the Science of Sport exhibition, is an inspiring piece of equipment in its own right but it also helps illustrate how changing technologies have forged world records and personal bests.
The show is part of a packed programme of Olympicthemed events at the Shropshire site that also includes a day of communal games at Blists Hill Victorian Town.
“We’re doing so much because we’re a tourist-driven museum and we’re close to Much Wenlock, the traditional birthplace of the modern Olympic movement,” says Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust chief executive Steve Miller.
“I think it’s important to give people the chance to have their own 2012 moment. There obviously has been criticism about everything being concentrated on London so this is a way of drumming up regional enthusiasm.”
Audience participation events include Games and Me, in which digital trickery enables punters to measure the speed of their kicked footballs and to take on Usain Bolt over a virtual 100 metres. “These events are attracting new audiences and give our traditional visitors something new,” adds Miller.
“We are also making use of our remarkable sporting archive, photographs and memorabilia relating to local heroes such as Captain Matthew Webb, the first man to swim the Channel, and Ironbridge boy Billy Wright, who earned 110 England football caps and was never booked.”
Overall, the Cultural Olympiad has come under fire for being complicated and unfocused, with its festivals within festivals. Many of the events centre on contemporary art, although it’s often difficult to see how they relate to the Olympics, beyond bearing its logo.
As a result, some commentators, such as Jonathan Jones in the Guardian, have wondered how the London 2012 festival, part of the Cultural Olympiad, “connects in any interesting way with the Olympics”.
This has not been a problem for those museums and galleries that have focused their activities on sport, and they often seem to have benefited from this tighter remit. Many Olympic-themed events in museums were kickstarted by the Our Sporting Life (OSL) programme.
It has helped more than 100 institutions to celebrate Britain as the birthplace of modern sport by encouraging communities around the UK to laud their own local legends. OSL was itself the brainchild of the Sports Heritage Network, a group created in 2003 to promote sports collections. Many people who work with this type of material believe the subject has not been taken seriously.
“We felt for a long time that the wider museum sector wasn’t listening enough to our expertise and experiences, yet we face the same challenges,” says Sports Heritage Network chairman Kevin Moore, who is also the director of the National Football Museum, which is opening in Manchester this July.
“There seem to be issues about sport and culture in British society that they don’t have, for example, in North America. There’s no problem with a sports museum over there being seen as a cultural attraction but we seem to have difficulty with it.”
Moore hails the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum’s commendation in the 2008 European Museum of the Year award as evidence of a sports attraction proving to be just as enjoyable a visitor experience as an art gallery.
“This division between sport and culture is partly a class issue,” adds Moore. “Why, for example, aren’t there museums dedicated to rugby league and boxing?”
He says that sport-based collections attract greater numbers of the kinds of people who don’t normally go to museums, such as ethnic minorities and those from the C2, D and E social classes.
There are now plans to extend the Our Sporting Life programme to take in future events such as the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow and the Rugby World Cup in 2015.
“Through OSL, a lot of museums have discovered new audiences, opportunities, volunteers, objects and – above all – some truly great links to their communities and schools,” says Paul Mainds, chairman of the OSL steering committee.
Through his day job as chief executive of the River & Rowing Museum, Henley-on-Thames, Mainds has seen for himself the blossoming enthusiasm for sport as his museum hosts events to celebrate the Olympic regattas of 1908 and 1948, which were held in the town.
“If you go back 20 or 30 years, the image of rowing was purely that of a university sport carried out by people in striped blazers,” Mainds says.
“It was a bit posh, all Boat Race and royal regattas. But Steve Redgrave almost single-handedly changed it into an inclusive sport. He’s not just an iconic rower, he’s an iconic figure.
“We have seen for ourselves how spending some time with an Olympic medal-winning athlete is inspiring to visitors of all ages,” Mainds continues.
“Our job as museums is to make sure that inspiration is available to as many people as possible.” In comparison to Redgrave, Albert “Lal” White was a very different kind of sporting hero from a very different age, but his story is every bit as absorbing.
White was a steelworker and spare-time cyclist from Scunthorpe whose passion for pedalling drove him to win a silver medal in the team pursuit at the 1920 Antwerp Olympics.
When not on the track, White was known to race whippets through Scunthorpe town centre and was also reckoned to have constructed the first static bike, which he made from old washing machine mangles. He is now the figurehead of an exhibition at North Lincolnshire’s Normanby Hall Country Park.
“Lal White’s achievements as the region’s only Olympic medallist, the strong history of bicycle manufacturing in the area and Britain’s continuing success at Olympic cycling are the perfect theme for our Cultural Olympiad activities,” said John Briggs, the cabinet members for sport, leisure and culture at North Lincolnshire Council.
“There are some great stories to tell local people and visitors from further afield; the project has been led by young people and is inspired by our region’s collection.”
If you really want to make a cultural statement in 2012, however, there can be no better way than to transform your historic premises into an actual Olympic venue.
London 2012’s Cycling Time Trial events will take place on the roads around Hampton Court, Henry VIII’s pleasure palace where the once-athletic king proved his sporting prowess in events ranging from real tennis to hunting and hawking.
Staff at Historic Royal Palaces (HRP), which manages the property, have been given a crash course in the sport as well as the facts and figures of hosting an Olympic event, according to the head of visitor services David Hingley.
“We are going to have three different influxes – the world’s media on the palace green, the competitors, their teams and VIP members of the ‘Olympic family’ and spectators who we can tempt inside to see us while they’re here,” says Hingley.
There will be a cycle-powered cinema with some HRP staff volunteering to provide pedal power, displays provided by the National Cycle Collection from Powys in the courtyards, along with a circus and music recitals in the Great Hall.
“It’s certainly not every day that you get a worldwide audience and, like the nation as a whole, it’s up to us to make the most of it,” Hingley says.
John Holt is a freelance writer
Olympian efforts
Shauna Richardson’s Lionheart Project involves three gigantic crocheted lions touring the country in a specially made 16 metre-long illuminated glass case mounted on a flat-bed lorry. It started at Chatsworth House in May (to 10 June) and will arrive at the Natural History Museum, London (20 July to 10 September), in time for the Olympic Games. The idea is based on the old-style travelling menagerie shows.
Photographs of members of the Sierra Leone women’s boxing team feature in an exhibition at the International Slavery Museum, Liverpool. Women’s boxing will be an Olympic sport for the first time at London 2012 but a lack of funding is preventing the Sierra Leone team from attending.
Three new outdoor sculptures by British artist Tony Cragg are being displayed along Exhibition Road, South Kensington, during the London 2012 Festival, the culmination of the Cultural Olympiad. A number of indoor works will be on show at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Science Museum and Imperial College.
Posters designed by avantgarde artists for the infamous Munich Olympic Games of 1972 are to be shown at Monkwearmouth Station Museum in Sunderland. Artists represented include David Hockney, Serge Paliokov, Oskar Kokoschka, Allen Jones and Max Bill.
The exhibition consists of 19 of the 26 original posters and runs until 5 June. The huge posters, part of the museum’s collection, have undergone conservation to repair minor damage.
London’s National Portrait Gallery has commissioned photographers to take portraits of athletes and other key figures involved in the London Olympics. An exhibition of the works is touring the UK and recently left Cardiff to go on display in Edinburgh (1 June–8 July) before moving to Birmingham (13 July– 9 September).