The LoneSwimmer himself, Mr. Buckley, succumbed to a moment of pique a while back when confronted with the Lidl ad for togs.  He threw down the goggles/gauntlet publicly (or on twitter anyway) and challenged the model to an open water swim.  No response from the model.

The unwittingly offensive Lidl ad, with the non-responsive male model who won’t race the LoneSwimmer.

I was reminded of the LoneSwimmer’s challenge by another togs ad from H2Open:

More common or garden open water swimmers, like you’d see around the beach any day.  Perhaps not our beach, though.

As the advertising industry is clearly interested in realistic portrayals of open water swimmers, I did a quick trawl of some of Siobhan Russell’s pictures.  I’ve pasted below a suitable portfolio of models, all available to pose for togs ads at any time.  Just come calling H2Open, Lidl et al – we’ve got what you need to shift togs by the bucket-load.

John and Frank – who wouldn’t want to buy their togs?  John is available for assignments in the US while he’s over swimming to Alcatraz shortly.

Togs-R-Us – a range of options here for the ad agencies. As an aside, I wonder how the models would have got on with Brenda for 13k across Galway Bay.

As Christmas products appear in shops already, the Festive togs advertising market should be sown up by K. Murphy. Ad agencies will be beating down his door.  He’s already well know in the wetsuit marketing arena – Huub, specifically.

And finally, for any togs marketer looking to corner the grey dollar in togs – the main men for the mature market: Pat and Tom – keeping it real, 365 days a year.

All enquiries for modelling work for any of our portfolio above should be addressed to Condons’ Cuties Model Agency, Slip Top, Myrtleville, Cork. 

Note: Models shown are for illustration only and may not be actual size, but they can all swim in the sea. Quite well, actually.