The Olympic champion posed in the revolutionary swimsuit for a full-page ad that appeared in Swimming World magazine. In the copy accompanying the photograph, the swimmer rhapsodizes about the suit’s “minimum water resistance and full body freedom” and how it “moves with you like a second skin.”

In 1974, long before Speedo’s LZR Racer entered the sport’s lexicon, Keena Rothhammer was keen on the Belgrad Ribbolastic, the first skirtless suit to be approved by the Amateur Athletic Union for competition.

Rothhammer pitched the suit but never wore it in competition. The endorsement contract — which helped her pay her way through U.S.C. — was hers to accept only because she had retired from the sport a year earlier, at the age of 17, after winning two medals, a gold and a bronze, at the 1972 Summer Games in Munich. In those days, a swimmer could not accept money and remain eligible to compete in the Olympics.

The “Dark Ages” is how Rothhammer now refers to those days. The newest suits, which a few athletes are paid upward of seven figures to wear, have more in common with wet suits than the racing suits Rothhammer modeled. They have been hailed by some as “awesome” and dismissed by others as “drugs on a hanger.”

With this fresh swimsuit war raging, one that pits the global Goliath of swimwear manufacturers, Speedo, against smaller, less-entrenched companies like TYR Sport Inc., Rings asked Rothhammer, now 51, who is married with a 25-year-old daughter and a 13-year-old son, for her perspective. This is what she had to say:

“With any new suit, there is always the physical advantage and the mental advantage. It is a physical advantage due to the high-tech construction of the suit. Many of us know the mental advantage is just as powerful. What you believe you can do is oftentimes the difference. That is the element of the suit that cannot be measured.

“Once FINA, the international governing body of swimming, allowed money into the system it changed everything. I competed because I loved my sport. Sponsorship and paying swimmers for records and wins changes the spirit of things. It becomes more about the sponsor than the swimmers; more about the marketing value that the swimmers bring to the sponsors.

“I am sure that many would like to try the new suit but are unable to due to their own contract and/or Speedo keeping it only for their own swimmers. I swam and represented my team in the U.S.A. and my country when I traveled. Somehow it seems this ideal may have been lost a bit with the advent of sponsorship.

“Business only wants to make a profit and use the technology to advance itself. That is its primary function. There are times that this ideal may be in direct conflict with what is best for the sport. FINA should be looking to see what is best for the sport and the athlete.”