Oldest, Youngest, Zodiacs, and the U.S. Men Get Younger at the 2025 World Championships

Math Note: the swimmers’ ages don’t quite line up with normal discussion, because we’re actually counting their ages in days, which includes leap days. This is most noticeable in cases like Simone Manuel and Alex Walsh, who have birthdays during the meet. Our math implies that their birthdays are before the meet, but in actuality, they occur during the meet.

The youngest U.S. Olympic men’s team in decades has yielded to an even younger team for the 2025 World Aquatics Championships, as many veterans are sitting out this season or retiring, giving way to a youth movement in USA Swimming.

Both the men’s and women’s teams for Singapore are younger than the ones the U.S. sent to the Olympic Games last summer in Paris; the men’s team by a significant margin.

Of last year’s Olympic Team, the five oldest swimmers (all men) didn’t return for Worlds: Nic Fink, Chase Kalisz, Ryan Held, Ryan Murphy, and Blake Pieroni. With Caeleb Dressel and Abbey Weitzeil, that’s seven of the eight oldest swimmers not returning, which is not entirely unexpected after an Olympic Games (especially an Olympic Games with a relatively-veteran roster).

All ages based on the date of the start of the swimming competition: July 27, 2025

Means & Medians

• The average of the whole team is 22 years, 219 days, which is almost a full year younger than the Olympic Team (23 years, 140 days).
• The average age of the men’s team is 22 years, 254 days, which is younger than the Olympic Team by almost a year. The absence of the six oldest men from that Olympic Team, plus the presence of high school swimmers like Luka Mijatovic, Campbell McKean, and Thomas Heilman, shifted the average substantially, though most of the team is still in their 20s.
• The median age of the men’s team is 22 years, 291 days. That’s slightly higher than the average.
• The average age of the women’s team is 22 years, 176 days, which is about three months younger than the Olympic Team. The women’s team average age has remained fairly stable since 2012 relative to the men’s team, which has seen more up-and-down movements.

Zodiac Signs

Historically, we’ve seen a sort of poetic trend of the aquatic-themed signs of Pisces (the fish) and Aquarius (the water bearer) lead the way in this category.

But that run has come to an end; with only 5 Aquarius swimmers and 5 Pisces swimmers, which is only slightly above the average expected for each sign. This year, Leos lead the way with 8 representative swimmers, followed by Geminis.

There has been a lot of research done on when kids are born and their relative success in sports based on having an extra 10 or 11 months of growth versus their grade-level peers. We haven’t seen that shine too brightly in recent US National Teams, but this year has more of it. The most common month for birthdays in this group is August; while that is before many states’ cutoff, lots of August baby parents choose to hold their kids back a year rather than having them be at a deficit age-wise.

Further examining August babies shows a mixed bag. Phoebe Bacon (from Maryland), Simone Manuel (from Texas), Jonny Kulow (from Wyoming), Henry McFadden (from New Jersey), and Patrick Sammon (from California) were all 18 as they started their freshman years of college, and so on the younger end of their grades.

Destin Lasco (from New Jersey), Rex Maurer (from California), and Dylan Gravley (from Nevada) were 19 as they started their freshmen years of college.

Matching the last two Olympic Teams, Wednesday continues to be the most common day for US swimmers on the big team every year to have been born. We have no idea why.

This team, regardless of their outcome in Singapore, is already beating the odds: a roster of 54 swimmers has an approximately 97% chance of two swimmers sharing a birthday, yet no two swimmers on this roster share a birthday. Brooke Travis does, however, share my birthday, which should count for something.

Oldest to Youngest

The American debutant (though not World Championship debutant) Santo Condorelli is the only 30-something at this year’s meet. In fact, Simone Manuel, who turns 29 during the meet, is the only other swimmer who is older than 28 (by days) on this team.

The youngest woman on the team is open water swimmer Brinkleigh Hansen from Florida. She is only 15 years old, which is an outlier these days (it hasn’t always been). The same is true for 16-year-old Luka Mijatovic. Claire Weinstein at 18 years, 153 days, is the youngest woman on the pool team.

Two swimmers, Manuel and Alex Walsh, have birthdays during the meet.