If you race in a short sleeve tri suit, you already know the swimskin dilemma. You can wear a sleeveless skin and let those exposed kit sleeves flap around in the water, or you can roll the kit down before the swim and deal with the wrestling match that follows. Neither option is great, and most of us just pick the lesser evil of flapping around and move on.

ROKA thinks it has a better answer.

The company just launched the Viper X.3 Ghost Short Sleeve, and it comes with some fresh credibility straight from Kona.

Weeks ago, Lucy Charles-Barclay and Marten Van Riel were first out of the water at the IRONMAN World Championship wearing the original Viper X.3 Ghost. This new version is built on that same platform, which ROKA calls the fastest swimskin on the planet. According to them?

That’s a big claim, and it’s ROKA’s to make, but how much did the swimskin matter for the likes of LCB and MVR?

What’s New

The headline change is the sleeve. The suit extends ultra low-drag coverage over the sleeve area, so your kit stays covered and slippery in the water. That fixes the drag problem, but the trade-off with any sleeved suit is feeling like you’re swimming (cough, shoulders) is restricted.

To tackle that, ROKA’s engineers overhauled their patented ARMS-UP™ technology, which is designed to give you more range of motion through the entire stroke.

According to Mark Stephens, ROKA’s SVP of Product, the team reworked the pattern with new stretch-woven fabrics that cover the arms but still free the shoulders. The goal is a suit that swims like a sleeveless skin while covering the sleeves your kit forces on you.

We haven’t had it in the water yet, so we can’t tell you how well that works but it’s the part we’re most curious to test because if you look at the image above, we love the idea of some stretch fabric.

What Carries Over

Everything that made the original Ghost the fastest skin in Kona comes along for the ride. The hydrophobic Ghost fabric repels water on contact, which keeps drag low from the first stroke to the last. The patented IXI™ internal streamline support connects your core from shoulders to hips, locking you into a streamlined position and helping you hold it once fatigue sets in. Which for most, around mile two of an Ironman swim, is when form tends to go out the window.

The construction is seamless and laser-bonded, so it fits like a second skin that disappears once you’re moving. And it comes in a high-visibility color that’s easy to spot in open water and, according to ROKA, cooler in intense sun. It’s anyones guess why black was always the norm. So dumb.

Sizing and Availability

The Viper X.3 Ghost Short Sleeve is available now at rokamultisport.com in 10 men’s and 10 women’s sizes. That’s a lot of sizing options for a piece of gear where fit makes or breaks the whole thing. We have a BlueSeventy and I think it came in maybe, 4 sizes. For us those we’re tight and then too small. Price? The X.3 will run you around $450.

Our Thoughts

With more and more wetsuit legal swims getting cancelled, owning a swimskin has become a very important investment. Most swimskin innovation gets framed around pros chasing seconds, but this one is aimed at a very everyday problem. Plenty of age-group athletes race in short sleeve kits because they’re comfortable, they’re what we own, and we don’t want to rebuild our whole setup for one leg of the race. A skin that works with the kit you already love, instead of making you rework your race day, is a win for everybody.

We’ve made our love for ROKA known and if I get to try this in the water, I’ll report back on exactly how it swims and if there are any negatives like shoulder restriction.