Aquatic Champions. For years their achievements went largely unnoticed, mainly due to the fact that everyone can quickly come up with a list of dozens of things they would rather do than watch someone swim competitively. Five just sprang to your mind while reading this sentence alone. But in 1948, on a warm summer day in Beverly Hills, the world stood up and took notice for the first annual Parade of Aquatic Champions. The world then quickly realized why they had never thrown one before or ever would again.

Abandoning many of the traditional parade conceits on the grounds that in water, floats tend to sink quickly and cause mass death, the Parade of Aquatic Champions instead focused mainly on introductions. One by one, the breathless narrator introduced the chlorine-bleached heroes, whose names spring readily to mind even over sixty years later:  Norman Spear Jr. Stubby Kruger. Anita Lowez. To call them mere cultural icons would be to spit in their faces. Instead, the participants in the Parade of Aquatic Champions transcend greatness itself. Especially when they're demonstrating something called the "Trudgeon Stroke".

Take a belly flop with Mike, Kevin and Bill into the sea of tedium, bacteria and greatness that is the Parade of Aquatic Champions.