I’m not sure wetsuits actually have to be made out of buoyant material. Before I bought a tri wettie, I had a surfing wetsuit which was warn but made abso no diff in speed. I tested it out in the pool by swimming 2 x 500 yd at mod effort with 2 min rest in between, one in the surf wettie and one in just my Speedo; both 500s were within a second of each other. In contrast, when I got a tri wettie, hell, I could tell immediately, just from pushing off the wall, that I was riding higher in the water, kind of like a super pull buoy. I’ve often wondered if Dan had to bribe the USAT, or actually Tri Fed as it was then, to allow his new neoprene wettie. 
Surfing wetsuits are buoyant.
Well, perhaps my surfing wettie was ever so slightly buoyant, but if so, its buoyancy was essentially negligible compared to the triathlon wettie.
If it was warm and made of neoprene, it was buoyant. That’s just how they work…
My old surfing wettie was not made out of neoprene. I can’t recall what it was made out of but it was not the black shiny neoprene. Jason, I don’t know what I can do to make you believe me but NON-BUOYANT WETSUITS DO EXIST. I KNOW B/C I WASTED MY MONEY ON BUYING ONE BY MISTAKE BEFORE I FOUND A REAL TRI WETTIE. So, all I’m saying is that, if USAT wanted to, they could require wetsuits to be non-buoyant. They could test them fairly easily: just throw the suit in the pool and see if floats or sinks. Of course, after 35 yrs of floaty wetsuits, this will never happen.
I’m wondering when people started using wetsuits in triathlons
I don’t recall anyone at Lake Placid wearing one in ‘84. I ended up with hypothermia. Speedos only going down hill in something like 55 degree weather I winder why lol
Last thing I remembered, before waking up in the back of the car 3 hours towards Rochester, was getting off the bike in T2.
I think around 1986-ish. I recall seeing them at Hilton Head in 1987, where the water was just barely wetsuit legal. Sounds like you got hypothermic on the bike though, but I’m sure being freezing coming OOTW was part of it. Sheet, I would’ve taken time to put on tights and long-sleeved shirt in T1. I abso HATE being cold on the bike.
if only there was a way to know the answers to questions like this ;-(
I didn’t want to bother you Dan b/c I know you’re busy with important tri-business stuff, but if you have the time, please tell us a brief history of the tri wetsuit. I’m espec interested in whether there was any discussion with Tri Fed about wetsuits being worn mainly to provide buoyancy, which technically I think would be in violation of the rules??? If you’ve read my other posts in this thread, you know that I bought a negligibly buoyant surfing wetsuit before I discovered your QR wetsuit, which was super buoyant compared to the surfing wettie. Thus I think it is possible to make a relatively non-buoyant wetsuit???
i would imagine i wrote all this somewhere on slowtwitch (on the front page), but in short strokes, prior to the beginning of the 1987 northern hemisphere season, nobody wore wetsuits unless the swim was quite cold. the founder of aquaman wetsuits (in france) disputes this. but, we had a lot of europeans coming to socal to train and race, and none of them brought a wetsuit. yes, there were wetsuits marketed to triathletes, bodyglove had ads in triathlete mag as far back as 1984, but they were pretty much just surf wetsuits, and only marketed for warmth, and nobody wore them in races.
at bass lake, in 1986, scott tinley and gary peterson wore their surf wetsuits. the race was in september then, and we were standing in snow waiting for the gun to go off. i thought to myself, well, tinley is going to be comfortable in the swim, let’s see whether he feels it was worth it later, after he gets smoked. and he didn’t get smoked. he swam fine.
that’s what gave me the idea that a wetsuit, optimized for swimming, might actually be a worthwhile thing to own. very long story short, there was about a 6 month interval between that bass lake race and the first wetsuits i had available for sale. my investigation into this wasn’t at all, in the least, for commercial purposes. i just was curious. this didn’t become a commercial enterprise until i swam my first 100 yards in my first wetsuit designed for surface swimming. i honestly didn’t know what that would yield. my hope was simply that it wouldn’t be slower than swimming without a wetsuit. i had to swim a second 100 because i literally thought i’d made a mistake in timing while swimming my first 100, because i swam that first 100 about 7 seconds faster than i should’ve. only after that first pool test did it occur to me that there’s a business opportunity here.
i could not convince any pro, beyond an initial 4 or 5 who were well known to me, that the wetsuit was worth racing in. the only pros who had an open mind were monty, andrew macnaughton and brad kearns. back in 87, the latter 2 were arguably, over the first half of the season, the world’s fastest, and part of that i’m sure is they had the 2 newest pieces of tech before anyone else did: the scott bar and the QR wetsuit. all the other pros - and i mean all of them - were certain they’d swim slower in the wetsuit than out of it. i didn’t sweat it. for each of them, that notion lasted exactly 1 race.
there were 2 local pros, tom gallagher and mike fillipow, who were also early converts, simply because i need to photograph someone in my wetsuits and those 2 graciously agreed. i still have those photos; they’re on slowtwitch.
it never occurred to me to ask TriFed (it wasn’t called USA Triathlon back then) about legality. there was no way they’d make the wetsuit illegal. what i did do was place on myself the guardrail of 5mm max rubber thickness. i felt that if i kept the wetsuit to a reasonable thickness, and didn’t get greedy, that the federation would give me no problem.
i have tried to get a photo for years, from the bakersfield californian, from 1987, in may, the bakersfield triathlon, a photo taken from the water, looking back at the start, right as the gun went off, the pro field first, and behind them the first age group wave. the entire pro field is in wetsuits, pretty much all of those wetsuits mine, and just behind in the AG wave none of them in wetsuits, except 1 brazilian aspiring pro who i happened to know. that pic represented, to me, and still does now, the difference between those who actually know stuff, who need to know stuff, for whom science, technology, engineering, facts, are imperatives, versus those who’re oblivious, or who unwittingly suffer from their ignorance or obstinacy.
most of those pros in that image did not want to wear a wetsuit; but every one of them was faced with a reckoning with what is, rather than what ought to be. it’s a parable for decisions we’re all faced with in life; and the bifurcation between our behaviors when the shit gets brown versus our behaviors when we have (or think we have) the luxury of acting on caprice and whimsy. my editorializing is beyond the scope of your question. but you got it anyway 
Well, the 1987 Bakersfield AGers simply did not know about wetsuits yet, that’s all. Obv they all learned in the next few years. Thanks very much for the history!!!