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STAR LETTER

Happy skins and wetsuit swimmers. Why can’t we all just get along?

Credit: Andrew Kenyon

Skins and wetsuits

I have found open water swimmers to be a remarkably friendly, relaxed and broad-minded community since I started a few years ago. Except when it comes to the question of wetsuits! I was really taken aback by the hostility of some of the views expressed in your letters pages in recent months. In general surely the right attitude must be one of welcoming inclusivity – what matters is getting more people in the open water, not whether we are wearing wetsuits or not. For many people, wetsuits have been essential in helping them overcome not just the cold, but fears/anxiety more broadly and, in some cases, disability.

I had to give up swimming in my 30s due to an unfixable shoulder injury but discovered by chance one day that the compression effect of a wetsuit miraculously protects my shoulder and allows me to swim regularly – without it I simply wouldn’t be able to swim. Occasionally people sneer at me, but I really couldn’t care less.

When it comes to races I completely understand the frustration of the skins community. Wetsuits are much faster and the playing field isn’t level unless there are separate skins and suits categories. In this regard, the ambiguity of the FINA wetsuit rules are really unhelpful and they surely need to be re-written. (It was also a bit sad to read that many non-FINA sanctioned races are going wetsuit only due to fear of an implicit legal risk from allowing skins.)