We're probably all familiar with the tendency of a Brooks to spread and sag permanently when it gets soaked and then gets sat on. How did generations of pros who used Brooks saddles deal with this before plastic shelled leather saddles became the norm? Racing routinely required/requires riding hours in the soaking wet with no mudguards. Stories of pros keeping one Brooks from bike to bike suggest that they weren't routinely discarding rain-sagged saddles. Using the nose bolt to take out slack seems like it couldn't accommodate the abuse that continental racing dished out.
I ruined one Brooks racing on it in the rain in the late 70s as a teen-ager and switched to plastic. Since then I protect my Brooks from the rain, and any racing I've done on them was on the track where we called off the racing when it got wet if the track wasn't indoors.
Mitch Harris
Little Rock Canyon, Utah