ZHANG KECHUN
MAO ZEDONG scored some of his greatest achievements while in swimming trunks. In 1956, he swam the Yangtze River and wrote a revolutionary poem imagining it transformed by industry. In 1958, he hosted a Sino-Soviet pool party and put Nikita Khrushchev in his place; the then-head of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party couldn’t swim and was famously photographed in the shallow end, wearing a child’s “water wings.” In 1966, Mao organized a swimathon that proved a founding moment of the Cultural Revolution, China’s brutal attempt to cleanse itself of what he deemed ideological impurities. Five thousand people splashed beside the Great Helmsman, under placards wishing him 10,000 years of life.