MARTINSVILLE — Beth Botsford was settling down for her daily nap. The day before, the 15-year-old Baltimore native had won one of the first gold medals for Team USA at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta.
She finished first in the 100m Backstroke, one of many victories the young swimmer had racked up over her short life. She’d go on to win a second gold medal as a member of the 4 x 100m Medley Relay team just two days later.
Botsford started swimming for the prestigious North Baltimore Aquatic Club when she was 9 and quickly set records in backstroke events for girls in her age group. By the time she was 14, she qualified to be one of the youngest athletes on the U.S. Olympic team.
The NBAC is elite — it’s churned out about a dozen Olympic swimmers, including Michael Phelps, who Botsford has known since he was 10-years-old.
As Botsford was falling asleep, one of the managers for Team USA entered the room.
“Hey, you have a phone call,” she said.
“I’m tired,” Botsford answered. “I’ll call them back later.”
“No, you’re gonna want to take this phone call,” her manager said.
“Ugh, why?”
“It’s the president of the United States.”
Botsford took the call.
Life after gold
Thirteen years after Botsford returned from Atlanta an Olympic gold medalist, she decided to sell everything in her house, pack up her white 2003 Honda Pilot, and roam the country, tending bar and styling hair along the way.
Her parents are still bewildered as to why she did this. Even now, she can’t fully explain why she became a nomad, only that her studio apartment in California was an untenable $1,750 a month and she just had a desire to be free.
By this time in 2009, the American economy was collapsing just as Botsford was learning to stand on her own two feet. Life was fairly normal for her after going gold in ’96.
The day after her flight touched down in Baltimore, she was back at swim practice. Her friends at the all-girls private school she attended didn’t treat her any differently upon her return — Beth was still just Beth.
She won even more awards for swimming. At the 1999 Pan American Games in Winnipeg, she took silver in the 200m Backstroke, and the next year, she found herself an NCAA Champion in the same event, swimming for the University of Arizona where she attended on scholarship. During her studies at Arizona, she would go All-American 16 times.
In her own words, Botsford never attended college to do anything other than swim. She wasn’t that interested in her classes, and she changed her major three times before eventually settling on Theater Arts because she liked working with makeup.
After graduation, she moved to California and worked as a bartender before finding a job doing marketing for a medical spa in Orange County. For the next few years, she worked for the spa during the day and went to beauty school at night.
Botsford found the question, “What do you do after ‘retiring’ from being one of the best swimmers in the world?” very easy to answer — you do hair.
The open road
By the time she got her cosmetology license in 2009, she knew if she wanted to stay in California, she needed a husband or a roommate so she’d have enough money to live. Instead, Botsford chose to move.
“I’ve never wanted to rely on another person to live,” she said. “I was a functionally selfish person back then. Selfish in that I wanted to do whatever I wanted whenever I wanted, but functional in that what I was doing was good. I was living.”
Botsford packed up her Honda. Clothes, Beastie Boys CDs and — most importantly — hair supplies: color, brushes, foils, everything she needed to be a wandering hair stylist was in that Honda Pilot. She came to know the American interstate system like it was a close friend. She went everywhere — Utah, Louisville, Chicago, Kansas City — any place where the people had hair.
She found her clients through Craigslist classifieds and worked local bars at night to make extra money. People would see an ad for a “Traveling Hair Stylist,” and Botsford would meet them in restaurants and cafes to discuss their hair. She’d then go with them to their homes and do a balayage for them (a highlighting technique), or put in hair extensions.
For her entire life, Botsford never worked less than two jobs, and not because she really needed to. There’s a restlessness inside her that keeps her in constant motion, never truer than in her wandering year. Sometimes she would arrive in a town, get a bartending job there the same day, and keep it for a week and a half before moving on to the next place. Beth Botsford couldn’t be tied anywhere.
Then in 2010, she got a call from her sister. Like Botsford, her sister was a wanderer. After college, she went knocking around New Zealand, met a man, married him and started a family there. They made a life together on a dairy farm and calving season was coming up. Botsford’s sister asked if she would come to the farm and act as a nanny for her nieces for a few months during such a busy time of the year. Botsford jumped at the chance.
She ended up staying for a year, and when calving season was done, she rambled all over New Zealand doing exactly what she did back in the U.S. — styling people’s hair and tending bars.
All this time, Botsford had kept her hair dry. In 2010, she hadn’t been in a pool in seven years, not since she graduated from Arizona. And she had no plans to get back in one, either — that was another, past life.
A return to roots
By 2012, Botsford found herself back in the States. She was invited to a wedding in Madison, Wisc., and afterward when everyone was asking around, “When are you planning to leave?” she found herself saying back to them, “I think I’m gonna stay.”
And so Botsford stopped wandering and settled down in Madison.
One day, she got a phone call from the head coach of the women’s swim team at the University of Wisconsin, Whitney Hite. The two knew each other from back when Botsford swam for Arizona — he was the assistant coach there. The two decided to get together for lunch.
“You know, I’m looking for a strong female for my coaching staff,” Hite said to her at lunch.
“Whitney, I haven’t been in swimming in like nine years,” Botsford told him.
“Beth, you get it,” he said. “YOU get it. Join my staff on a trial basis, and if you don’t like it, we’ll part ways, no hard feelings.”
And so Botsford became the assistant swim coach at the University of Wisconsin. After all her travels, she found herself poolside once again.
Becoming
Her name is Beth Chitwood now, and she’s been talking for 13 uninterrupted minutes. She apologizes for rambling and wonders aloud if any of what she’s saying is even relevant. She’s assured that all of it is.
Her hair these days is long and dark — far gone are the days when she would dye it a different color before every swim meet. Chitwood is 42 and sitting in the two-room salon she runs, Chitwood Aesthetic Concepts, on 60 W. Morgan St. in downtown Martinsville. She opened in February, and for the first time in her life, she’s only working one job, at least on paper. Motherhood now constitutes a full-time gig all its own.
In 2017, Beth Botsford went back to Arizona and became the assistant coach for the women’s swim team. It was there she met fellow coach Cory Chitwood. When Cory Chitwood moved to Indiana in 2019 to be the associate swim coach for the Hoosiers’ perennial powerhouse, Botsford followed him. They got married in October 2020, and in November, at the age of 39, Beth was pregnant with her first child.
When she gave birth to her daughter, she was 40. A year and a half later she had a son.
“I have lived like a thousand lives,” Chitwood said. “Now I can really enjoy my children and focus my energies on them and my husband.”
One day in 2023, she was walking the streets of Martinsville while her kids were at daycare. She stumbled across a building for lease and stopped to take a look. The idea to set up shop there hit her instantly.
Chitwood doesn’t swim anymore. She explains, half-joking, half-serious, that she doesn’t want to put her hair through all that. But she recounts with glee how her daughter will, besides her face, completely submerge herself in the bathtub, and she laughs describing how her young son likes to put his whole face into a body of water and blow bubbles.
The sportswriter Wright Thompson wrote a classic profile of Michael Jordan when the NBA star was turning 50. He describes a legend struggling to cope with getting old, a man living in the past, bitter that he’s no longer in the game.
Chitwood is nothing like that. She winces when she’s asked if, during her wandering years and even now, she’s trying to run away from her life as a swimmer. She’s been asked this question a lot.
“I’ve never considered myself a swimmer,” Chitwood said. “It’s not that I’m trying to get away from that part of myself. I’ve just always known that I was good at other things.”
Chitwood has been an Olympic swimmer, a bartender serving drinks at motorcycle rallies, an international traveling hair stylist and a coach. Now, in this life, she’s committed to being a mom.
“You’re gonna think I’m crazy…” she begins for the fourth time, before saying something that sounds a little crazy.
But Beth Chitwood isn’t crazy at all. She’s just lived a lot of lives.
