Why Competitive Swimmers Still Shave Off Everything Before a Big Race

At the 2021 U.S. Olympic swimming trials in Omaha, Nebraska, Kevin Cordes showed up looking, as Sports Illustrated writer Pat Forde described it, "like the GEICO caveman" — thick beard, full head of hair, plenty of fur on the rest of him. Two days and four razors later, the 2016 Olympian in the 100-meter breaststroke was nearly hairless, down to a friend shaving the parts of his back he couldn't reach himself.

He wasn't alone. More than 400 swimmers went through the same ritual that week at the trials, according to Forde's reporting — clippers first, then razors, then, for the spots nobody can reach solo, a teammate. It's a whole spectacle, three-time Olympian Elizabeth Beisel, now a TV analyst, told Forde. Beisel said she once shaved the hair on her toes before a meet.

The shedding isn't superstition dressed up as science. It's closer to the other way around.

Swimmers train through most of the year without shaving at all — hockey has playoff beards, Forde noted; swimming has training beards. Everyone thinks we're fully shaved all the time, American star Caeleb Dressel told him. We're actually some of the hairiest people around. The hair only comes off in the final days before the meet that matters, timed to a broader taper in training load.

The physical case for shaving is straightforward: less hair means less friction moving through water. The swim-coaching platform MySwimPro, citing sports-science research, says a full-body shave measurably reduces drag and helps swimmers hold their speed longer per stroke. One study it cites, of nine breaststroke swimmers, found lower blood lactate and more distance covered per stroke after a full shave; another, involving 12 swimmers, found that shaving combined with a training taper increased power output and distance per stroke by about 5% each.

Shaving does something else, too: it strips away a layer of dead skin along with the hair, which swimmers describe as sharpening the feel of water moving across the body. You feel very sensitive and aware of the water, 2016 Olympic medalist Maya DiRado told Forde. Beisel put it more simply: You feel so smooth and slick in the water ... it just gets you in that game-ready mode.

That mental lift may matter as much as the physics. Forde's reporting on the ritual — including Cordes describing a pre-trials dream about swimming in a bear costume, which he took as a signal it was time to taper and shave — frames the shave less as a hack and more as a threshold: the moment months of unglamorous training turn into race week.

The practice isn't new. Shaving caught on with the swimming world after Australian swimmers shaved down before the 1956 Melbourne Olympics and won gold, and it has stuck as a near-universal pre-meet ritual ever since, for men and women, at every level from age-group meets to the Olympic trials, not just for the athletes who end up on a podium.

The habit crosses over into other endurance sports too, for a different reason than speed. Cyclists and triathletes often shave for safety: body hair can act like Velcro in a crash, according to MySwimPro, catching against pavement and tearing skin along with it, so smooth legs mean a cleaner slide and less road rash if a bike goes down.

It also comes with a practical cost nobody advertises on TV: plumbing. Forde's dispatch from the Omaha trials described hotel drains overwhelmed by the shedding, with a local plumber warning that "when lots of hair is going down the drains, it will create backups and clogs." Beisel recalled the athlete-village showers at the 2008 Beijing Olympics as being particularly bad. I don't know what was wrong with the drains in the village, she said. It was disgusting, to be honest.

None of that has slowed the ritual down. As construction continues on the temporary competition pool being built inside SoFi Stadium for the 2028 Los Angeles Games, the swimmers who eventually race in it will spend the year training with a beard, not against one, then clear it all off in the final days before it counts — the same way Cordes, Dressel and Beisel did in Omaha.