Why Do Divers Shower After Every Dive?

Divers shower between dives for two reasons: to stay warm, and to get dry.

Both of those sound minor and a little wimpy (and swimmers hate us for it).

Reason one: staying warm

A pool deck at a big meet is cold. The air is warm for spectators, you're soaking wet, and you're standing around in a swimsuit that covers almost nothing.

Now here's the part people don't realize watching on TV. At a real competition you might wait fifteen or twenty minutes between your dives. Sometimes longer. You do one dive that lasts about a second and a half, and then you sit there while thirty other people go.

Cold muscles get tight, and tight muscles are slow. Diving is a fast-twitch sport where the whole thing is decided in the fraction of a second you're leaving the board. If you've stiffened up, you don't get that back on the way down.

So divers rinse off in water that's warmer than the pool (also removing the chemicals from the pool), or climb into a hot tub if the facility has one. It's the same reason a sprinter keeps a jacket on between heats.

Reason two: staying dry

This one is less obvious and honestly more important.

In a tuck position, a diver grabs their own shins and squeezes as tight as they physically can. That grip is what holds the body in a tight ball, and a tighter ball spins faster.

Wet skin on wet skin slips.

If your hands come off your legs halfway through a two and a half somersault, you don't get to try again. You come out of the dive early, you're not where you thought you were, and you land however you land. That's how people get hurt, and it's a guaranteed bad score even when you don't.

A quick rinse followed by a fast towel-off gets rid of the film of pool water chemicals sitting on your skin. Weirdly, getting wet on purpose is how you get properly dry and keeps your skin and hair healthier longterm.

Other things you're probably wondering

If you're watching diving and squinting at the screen, these are the ones that come up next. Click what you want to learn about:

• Why do they all have those tiny towels?
• Why is the water being sprayed? 
• Why are the swimsuits so small?
• Why do some divers have tape all over them? 
• How fast are they actually going? 

And if you want the thing that unlocks the whole sport, learn what the numbers mean. When the graphic says 105B, that's not a code for insiders. It tells you exactly what dive is about to happen, and once you can read it you'll be the coolest person at your Olympic watch party.

- DG