Tough one?
Weissmuller…Did any of those other guys play Tarazan?
Kabam!
Agreed! Johnny Weissmuller!
So many people are critically egocentric. They speak only from their own experience. Often egocentricity is destroyed by being well read or well travelled (preferably both)
While I’m old, I’m not old enough to been around at the same time as Weismuller, but thanks to being well read, I know quite a few things outside my own personal experience.
Weismuller dominated swimming in his day. However, he was horribly wrong with one of his most infamous statements. “you cannot swim fast with your face in the water” (or something to that effect. Johnny Weismuller both revolutionized swimming (much like Wayne Gretzky did with scoring goals from behind the net), he also dominated in his day. He was a household name, even more than Phelps & Co.
All the others so far merely build on what he did, and dominated for a while.
Although Mark Spitz is out of the discussion according to the OP, he also became a euphemism for swimming and domination, being, even to this day, a household world. And he very nearly made a come-back at nearly 100 years of age 