$wimming $uits up for Championship$

Penn men's swimming is off to Harvard for this year's Ivy League Championships — you can read all about it in today's DP. But in addition to busing the team up to Boston and housing them, there's one more major cost for the swim program — or investment that is.

In a class we share, breaststroke star Brendan McHugh broke out his top-of-the line Speedo Fastskin LZR racer swimsuit. If you're not familiar with these high technology, aerodynamic spacesuits jammers, here's a description from Speedo's website.

The World's Fastest Swimsuit: Speedo has harnessed the expertise of NASA and a number of international research institutes to create a faster suit which has 10 percent less passive drag than Speedo's FASTSKIN FSII launched in 2004 and 5% less passive drag than Speedo's FASTSKING FS-PRO, which was launched in March 2007 and has seen swimmers break 21 World Records as a result.

The price tag for these bad boys, endorsed by Michael Phelps, is $260. But Penn gets a steep discount, paying $140, according to McHugh. Multiply that by 17 swimmers going to championships, and that's $2,380 in sunk cost (pun intended).