The Purists' Plunge

Paul Steinbach Headshot

When U.S. Olympic swimming legend Mark Spitz spoke at the 2008 Athletic Business Conference, he told a decades-old story about how coaches from the Soviet Union had once asked Spitz why he wore a mustache in competition. At the time, he knowingly relayed the falsehood that the facial hair reduced drag in the water. By the next international competition, every Russian swimmer sported a 'stache. Such was the level of gamesmanship in 1970s aquatics.

Today, competitive edges - real or perceived - aren't right under swimmers' noses. They're far more obvious. Full-body swimwear, their materials and manufacturing processes engineered for optimum water-repelling performance, have rendered quaint not only the anecdotes of standard-bearing athletes like Spitz, but to some degree their accomplishments, too.

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