Cameron van der Burgh & team challenge you to the Movember Relay Challenge

South Africa’s World Record-holding and Olympic champion breaststroker Cameron van der Burgh has a challenge for you – and your mustache.

In an effort to raise money and awareness for cancer research, Van der Burgh and three of his countrymen have embraced No-Shave November, also known as Movember (a combination of “Mustache” and “November”), putting a swimming-centric twist on the festivities, and calling on swimmers everywhere to get involved.

Logo courtesy of SwimSwam’s Janna Schulze.

Van der Burgh, former World Champ Gerhard Zandberg, World Champs bronze medalist Giulio Zorzi and African Championships medalist Shaun Harris (a cancer survivor now in remission) have teamed up to swim a mustachioed 4×50 medley relay, and they want you to take on both their time and their facial hair.

Watch the guys swim their relay here.

The rules are very simple:

1. Find three friends.
2. Film yourselves swimming a 4×50 medley relay
3. All relay members must sport mustaches – real or drawn on. For female challengers (or men who are, shall we say, mustache-challenged), get out your sharpies and show off your best artwork.
4. Send us the video. Deadline is December 15th to be eligible for prizes.

If you can beat the South Africans’ time, you move into the lead! If you don’t meet the time, you must donate any amount you wish to cancer research at Movember.com.

Oh, and did we mention that the men’s and women’s relays that put up the fastest overall times will earn prize packages from one of Van der Burgh’s sponsors Arena?

A few notes:

• You can take the challenge in long course or short course – we’ll use our Speedo Time Converter to compare times in different courses.
• Only swims done in FINA-legal suits will count for the prizes. Sorry old-timers – those full-body Jakeds will have to stay in storage.
• Try to have multiple timers – preferably three, taking the middle of the three times for your offical submission.
• Take the challenge in good faith in terms of relay exchanges
• At the end of your video, challenge another team to take on the Movember Relay Challenge! Maybe you’ve got a rival club or a rival college you’d like to take on. Maybe you just want to see your friends sport goofy mustaches in a viral video. In either case, challenge away!

Submit your video to us, and we’ll post them all. (That’s a prize in itself – I mean, who doesn’t want to become SwimSwam-famous??). While the official contest requires a 4×50 relay to win prizes, for posting on SwimSwam, we’ll accept an 8×25 relay from 14 & under groups as well for posting on SwimSwam – it all helps to raise awareness.

Here are the times to beat. The South African crew swam their relay in long course meters, so we’ve converted the time to yards to give American swimmers a benchmark to shoot for:

Times to Beat:

 1:40.18 – Current Leader

Good luck.

1. Tuks A: 1:40.18 – Gerhard Zandberg, Cameron van der Burgh, Giulio Zorzi, Shaun Harris
2. Tuks B: 1:45.70 – Neil De Villiers , Marko Visser, Wesley De Jager, Vaughan De Jager
3. Tuks C 1:45:77 – Darren Murray? Robert Harrington-johnson Trevor Austin Nic Deacon
4. Tuks D 1:51.92 – Johan Lourens, Anrich Kleynhans Armand Maritz Malesela Molepo
5.  ????