The materials used in the new breed of competition skinsuits — full suits, leggings, jammers and briefs — are so tight and sheer at times they simply look painted on. On top of how amazing these suits look — so slick and shiny on wet muscles — it has become a habit for competitive swimmers to strip down the tops of their full suits after a race, revealing their lean torsos and the fine lines in their waists. They seem to me like impossible visions.

All of these photos were taken by Finneye for Outsports.com last December in Finland at the 2006 European Short Course Swimming Championships. If you haven’t visited these extensive galleries, then I recommend you click here. Finneye has a nice Flickr gallery as well.

Stanford swimmer Randall Bal is one of the top competitive swimmers in the US, long and lean, sometimes blond, sometimes darker and crewcut, as you can see from the photos below, collected online over a period of time.

It is possible some of these photos are not of him, so I’d appreciate any comments or corrections from readers. Trying to figure out who is who in competitive swimming is like throwing darts at a target while blindfolded. Everyone looks nearly the same in goggles and a latex cap.

More Stanford swimmers in their cardinal red speedos.

(Note: The stacked image is an old one posted by queerclick.com several months ago. A warning that queerclick is a sexually oriented gay blog. Do not go there unless you wish to see that kind of content.)

Here are the first seven of fifteen images I have of the Stanford waterpolo team. Some of these images have become quite famous over the past year. I’ve collected them one and two at a time from all over the blogosphere. I’ve also made some wallpapers of them, which I will post soon.

These are mostly photos from Stanford University’s official swim team website.

The team has a wonderful slide show screensaver with some of these photos and many more.

Ohio State Senior Joe Doyle has made — ahem — a splash! (sorry) with gay bloggers lately. Can’t imagine why (I think I’m gonna faint…).

Trey Cruz has a short piece on him this month here.

The rest of these images have been collected from a number of different swim fan blogs. I have a feeling some of these pictures are by Flickr athletic photographer CulverPC, but I’m not positive. His photo archives are a marvel, as I’ve mentioned before., so please go visit in any case.

A few of these pix are on the small side, but I’ve postd the largest ones of each I can find.

Guys have become so obsessed with shrinking the waistline on speedos that they have even taken to creating tiny where none existed. Witness these two recent examples of Photoshop manipulation of widely circulated swimming images by bloggers. Even leggings have shrinking waistlines these days.

I say, thank the Japanese for inventing the tiny speedo. More to come….

The Japanese were the first to explore the ever shrinking speedo, in lifeguard competitions, triathlons, and in the pool. Here are a few examples.

To see the effect their tiny, low-slung speedos have had on competition swimmers in Europe and the Americas already, see the next post above this one.

While on Thanksgiving break, I’ve been sorting through my folders, building sets, creating files for speedo colors, waterpolo players and various swimming celebrities.

Here’s a man who may not even know he is a celebrity, but this first photo has been all over the speedo and gay blogosphere in the past few months. And I’ve just found a couple more from the same sequence. These images were taken by Australia’s William.