Why Is There A Hot Tub At Diving Competitions?
Because divers spend most of a competition waiting, and waiting means you can get cold pretty easily.
The part TV doesn't show you
On a broadcast, diving looks continuous. One dive, next diver, next dive.
In the building it's nothing like that. You do a dive that lasts about 20 seconds from when they read your dive to your entry.
Then you wait while everyone else goes. At a big meet with a full field, that's fifteen to twenty minutes before your next one. Sometimes longer.
So across a three hour competition, a diver is airborne for fifteen to thirty seconds total. Everything else is sitting around wet in a swimsuit.
Cold muscles lose the dive before it starts
Diving is a fast-twitch sport. The dive is decided in the fraction of a second you're leaving the board, when your legs are driving and your arms are swinging and everything has to fire in the right order at full power.
Cold muscles are tight and slow. If you've been sitting on a bench shivering for twenty minutes, you're not going to snap into a tuck the way you did in warmups, and you can't get that back on the way down.
The hot tub solves it. You can sit in warm water and use it to aid in your activation before your dive.
It's the same logic as a sprinter keeping a jacket on between heats, or a pitcher throwing in the bullpen. Nobody thinks that's odd. Diving just does it in public, in a jacuzzi, in front of a camera.
It's also the meet's living room
The hot tub is where everyone is between dives during warm ups and after dives in competition.
There's a small skill to using it, too. You don't want to sit in there too long to the point of making you sluggish, and you'll be soaking wet at the exact moment you need to be dry if you don't buget your time well before your dive.
Most divers give themselves enough time to dry off with a chamois finish their predive warm up and visualize.
What if there's no hot tub?
Plenty of pools don't have one. Then divers do the same thing with what's available: a warm shower between dives, a parka or a towel over the shoulders, and moving around instead of sitting still for too long.
Everybody is different and everybody likes to do different things to prepare for their dive.
The hot tub isn't the point. Staying warm is.
Other things you're probably wondering
- Why do divers shower after every dive?
- Why do divers use those tiny towels?
- Why do divers wear tape?
- Why is water sprayed on the diving pool?
- DG