The first time I try Speedo iQ, the brand’s new smart swimming goggles, I wonder whether I’ve missed something. They look like a normal pair of goggles. They feel like a normal pair of goggles. And there’s no augmented-reality display or data screen, as I’d expected from a £149 gadget promising to analyse my swimming in more detail than any smartwatch ever has. This thing is the future of swim tech, according to its creators, and three-time Olympic gold medallist Adam Ramsay-Peaty is already a fan. Can the user experience really be as simple as pressing a black button and just… swimming normally?
Apparently so. It’s only as I walk back to the changing rooms after my first 1km swim and the goggles sync with my phone that I discover they’ve been watching me rather closely. Alongside the distance and pace data I usually get from my Garmin, there’s my breathing, head position and turn performance — even a moving avatar recreating what my head was doing underwater. My average head angle was 33 degrees, but at my best I managed seven — much closer to the neutral position the app tells me reduces resistance. Suddenly I’m looking at something I’ve never really thought about in decades: not just how fast I swim, but how I swim.
