Divers throw their small towel (called a chamois or “shammy”) into the water below the platform to give themselves a visual reference point on the surface. A still pool can look like a flat, featureless plane from 10 meters up, making it surprisingly hard to judge distance while spinning through the air. The towel sitting on the water’s surface gives the diver something to see, helping them time their entry correctly.
Why a Still Pool Is Hard to See
From the height of a diving platform, a calm pool surface can appear almost invisible. Without texture, color contrast, or movement on the water, a diver has very few visual cues to gauge how far away the surface is. This matters enormously when you’re completing multiple somersaults and twists in under two seconds and need to know exactly when to open up your body for a clean entry.
This problem is well understood in the sport. FINA, the international governing body for aquatic sports, actually requires “mechanical surface agitation” at diving facilities specifically to help athletes with “visual perception of the surface of the water.” That’s why you’ll see sprinklers or jets spraying the pool during competitions. Canadian high diver Molly Carlson, a world championship silver medalist, explained it plainly to her millions of followers: “If you can’t see the surface of the water, you’re not going to know how to adjust properly.” The sprayers aren’t there to soften the landing. From 20 meters, the water still hits hard.
How the Towel Works as a Marker
During flips and twists, divers lose sight of the water repeatedly. They rely on spotting fixed reference points, like landmarks in the building or objects on the water, to orient themselves and know when the landing zone is approaching. A shammy floating on the pool surface provides exactly that kind of target: a small, visible patch of contrast against the blue water.
Throwing the towel before a dive is especially common during training and warm-ups, or in outdoor settings where light and glare can make the surface even harder to read. It gives the diver a personal marker right where they plan to enter the water, complementing whatever sprayer system the pool uses.
What Divers Actually Throw
The “towel” you see isn’t a regular bath towel. It’s a chamois, a small piece of poly-vinyl cloth roughly 13 by 17 inches. Divers carry these everywhere. The material absorbs a large amount of water and can be wrung out instantly to become dry again, unlike cotton towels that stay soaked after one use. It’s compact, lightweight, and easy to toss.
The chamois serves double duty throughout a competition. Between dives, it quickly dries a diver’s body, hands, and legs. Staying dry matters because wet skin changes grip. Divers need enough moisture to keep their hands from slipping when they grab their legs during a tuck, but not so much that water is streaming down their body and throwing off their control. The shammy hits that balance perfectly, which is why it has been a staple of the sport for decades.
Because it’s small and absorbent, it’s also easy to retrieve from the pool and wring out before the next dive. A full-size cotton towel would be heavy, bulky, and impractical to throw and recover repeatedly.
Sprayers vs. Towels
At major competitions like the Olympics, mechanical sprayers handle the job of breaking up the water’s surface. These create a constant pattern of ripples that gives every diver on every attempt a textured surface to spot. But sprayers aren’t available at every pool, and even when they are, some divers prefer the added security of their own visual target sitting right in their intended entry zone. The towel toss is a low-tech backup that costs nothing and works immediately.
You’ll notice it more often at outdoor high-diving events, where sun glare can turn the pool into a mirror, and at practice sessions where sprayer systems may not be running. For platform divers working from 10 meters, and especially high divers working from 20 meters or more, that extra fraction of a second of visual certainty can be the difference between a clean entry and a painful mistake.