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How synchronized swimming became a contact sport
What does it take to be a U.S. Olympic artistic swimmer?
At a minimum, it demands endurance, power, leonine grace, hair gelatin, dance lessons, mastery of the eggbeater, flamingo, scull and rocket split, daily seven-hour practices, the limberness of fresh linguine, abs of granite, exceptional breath control, pink nose plugs, frequent bruises, occasional concussions, but not, at least during this Olympic cycle, a man.
Under new regulations, men were to be allowed to compete in artistic swimming for the first time this year at the Olympic level. (They’ve been able to participate at the World Championships and other lower-level competitions since 2015.)
But the man widely considered the world’s best male artistic swimmer, 45-year-old William May, of Santa Clara, Calif., who had been training and competing with the U.S. team in the run-up to the Olympics, was not on the final nine-person squad announced this summer.
Adam Andrasko, the chief executive of USA Artistic Swimming, described May as “the most talented male artistic swimmer ever,” even though he didn’t make the cut.
No other team in the Olympics this summer will include men, either. “At this point, there just aren’t any men who are ready to compete” in artistic swimming at the Olympic level, Andrasko said.
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A changing and riskier sport
But while the possibility of men joining artistic swim teams in Paris has been dominating media attention this year, a bigger story has been brewing in the background, about the nature of artistic swimming itself and its increasing rigor, athleticism and risks.
“Even just since Tokyo,” the site of the last Summer Games, “the sport has changed a lot,” said Anita Alvarez, 27, the only member of the current U.S. team who competed at the Tokyo Games, as part of a duet.
Tricks, known as elements, have become more intricate and taxing, the throws higher, the time spent in apnea - or breathlessness while underwater - longer.
Today’s elite artistic swimmers also look different, with greater lean muscle and less emphasis on waterproof mascara than in years past. Their routines now include an event new to the Paris Olympics, called acrobatics, that requires some swimmers to lift and fling others, known as fliers, as much as six feet into the air, where the fliers twist, flip and pike back toward the surface.
No one ever touches the bottom of the pool.
“It’s a crazy sport,” said Andrea Fuentes, the U.S. team’s head coach and herself a three-time Olympian for her native Spain. “What they do, it’s almost impossible, but they do it, and they make it look so easy.”
They have to, of course. They’re judged on presentation, on smiling and seeming unruffled, with gelatin-slicked hair and shiny stage makeup. But even as the sport slowly opens to men, its evolution at the Olympics could provide a showcase for a more-modern female athleticism, one that’s gritty, powerful, competent and alluring, even if the athletes are upside-down, underwater and unable to breathe.
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A new name and a new coach
First, though, let’s get this out of the way, since you’re probably wondering. Yes, artistic swimming is the same sport that used to be called synchronized swimming, although even the Olympians often forget and casually refer to their sport as “synchro.” (I was a synchronized swimmer in high school. Our team was called “Sync or Swim.”)
The name was changed after the 2016 Summer Olympics by World Aquatics, international swimming’s governing body, in an attempt to piggyback on the success of women’s gymnastics. Few people know that the formal name of Simone Biles’s sport is artistic gymnastics, to differentiate it from rhythmic gymnastics, which involves fluttery ribbons and other props.
The U.S. synchronized swimming organization didn’t formally adopt the new name until 2020, and with some reluctance, Andrasko said. “People knew what synchronized swimming was.”(But most of us probably don’t realize the synchronization is to music, not other swimmers, explaining how the sport can have a solo division.)
Andrasko and others involved with artistic swimming hope the name change won’t confuse and deter people from seeking out coverage of the sport in Paris.
And people should tune in, he and the team’s athletes and coaches say, because the current U.S. team is the strongest in decades, if not ever.
This spring, at the World Championships in Doha, Qatar, the U.S. team won bronze for both their acrobatic and free routines and placed fourth in the technical event. Perhaps most important, thanks to that performance, the U.S. team qualified for the Olympics, for the first time since 2008.
Qualification represented a heady return to form for a program that once dominated the sport, winning Olympic gold in 1984, 1992 and 1996. But, plagued with insufficient funding, facilities and coaching at the elite level and some entrenched cultural snobbery about synchro not being a serious sport for serious athletes (looking at you, Saturday Night Live), the U.S. program settled into mediocrity, qualifying duets for the 2016 and 2020 Games, but not the full team.
Then came Fuentes, the most decorated swimmer in the history of the Spanish national team and a former Olympic synchronized swimmer.
A “force of nature,” according to Andrasko, Fuentes had declined offers from several other countries and instead moved to the United States to take over its relatively moribund program in 2018.
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Adding CrossFit training and muscle to an artistic sport
Fuentes and her assistants rapidly revamped the team, starting with cajoling May to return. A standout artistic swimmer for decades, he’d previously trained with the national team, then left to join the high-paying Cirque du Soleil water extravaganza in Las Vegas. He agreed to come back, in large part to help anchor the new acrobatic routines and try for an Olympic spot.
“No one says no to Andrea,” May said.
The coaches also found a CrossFit trainer to start leading the swimmers through strenuous strength workouts, prompting condescension from some rival national teams’ coaches. “They said, oh, your team, they will all get too big,” Fuentes said.
But now, with the United States returning to the top of the sport, those other programs are scurrying to hire their own strength and conditioning trainers, she said.
Finally, with an eye on the Olympics, she and her assistant coaches began upping the oomph of the team’s various routines, adding multiple new elements with higher and higher degrees of difficulty.
But in today’s Olympic-level artistic swimming, there’s an increasingly indistinct line, wavering like sunlight on water, dividing winning medals from hospitalizing athletes.
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Bigger tricks, greater risks
Call it the water rescue gasped at ‘round the world. In 2022, Anita Alvarez, reaching the final moments of a solo routine at the World Championships in Budapest, completed the last of her upside-down, underwater twirls and layouts, breached the water’s surface, tossed back her head and promptly fainted, sinking limply toward the bottom of the pool.
Before the lifeguards could react, Fuentes dove in, grasping Alvarez and muscling her to the side of the pool. There, Alvarez gasped, retched and slowly recovered consciousness. Photos and videos of the episode flew around the internet.
This was Alvarez’s second blackout. A year earlier, she’d passed out at a competition in Barcelona. Fuentes had pulled her from the pool then, too.
To this day, no one, including team physicians, cardiologists, psychologists or Alvarez herself, can explain what happened or why she fainted. The episodes might be related to a condition known as shallow-water blackout, in which someone holds their breath repeatedly or for an extended period of time underwater, altering the body’s balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide and leading to unconsciousness.
But it’s not clear if that’s what happened, or if it was “stress, fatigue, or just everything catching up with me, all at once,” Alvarez said. Throwing her head back dramatically at the end of a grueling routine probably didn’t help, either. She and the team are trying to avoid similar choreography.
At the same time, though, updated scoring rules taking effect at the Paris Olympics give greater weight than ever before to the degree of difficulty of each trick the swimmers perform.
“If a team wants to win, they will have to have the highest degree of difficulty they possibly can,” Fuentes said. “We want to win.”
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7 hours in the pool
It’s about 6:30 a.m. and overcast at the empty, outdoor pool in Exposition Park in Los Angeles. Twelve swimmers, representing the full national team before the final Olympics selection, stream out of the locker rooms, clad in swimsuits and thick facial coatings of white zinc oxide, tugging on caps, goggles and nose plugs. (Only the nose plugs are allowed in competition.)
For the next seven hours, they’ll barely leave the pool, conferring with coaches, coordinating hand gestures and practicing the same 15-second snippet of choreography over and over. And over. They’ll snack in the water, grabbing bars and water bottles from poolside, their white faces bobbing above the surface like exotic water lilies.
The entire time, their legs eggbeat beneath the surface, keeping them afloat at rest and launching them skyward during acrobatics.
At about 1:30, they’ll leave the pool, heading to the gym for 90 minutes of pull-ups, planks and kettlebell dead lifts.
This is what it takes to be a U.S. Olympic artistic swimmer.
“Sometimes, by the end of practice, they’re so exhausted, I worry they won’t make it to the side of the pool” to clamber out, said Chelsea Fan, the team’s full-time physical therapist.
These prolonged, repetitive practices exact a toll. Tendons sprain, ribs crack, spirits droop. The team has a dedicated sports psychologist to help deal with stress, and Fan to tackle injuries. She’s at work on a guide to artistic-swimming-related concussions, which are surprisingly common, usually from ringing kicks to the head when eight swimmers whip their legs around within inches of each other.
“It’s absolutely a contact sport,” Fan said.
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‘Such a great show’
Artistic swimming is not, however, lucrative. May made a good living with Cirque, he said, and now will retire from competition to serve as manager and head coach for the Santa Clara Aquamaids, a large club team in California.
But the core members of the national team receive little monetary support from the U.S. Olympic Committee, and few can work, given their practice schedules. Some are in college or high school and live in dorms or at home. The rest rely on family and friends for monetary help.
“There are sacrifices, for sure,” in aiming for gold, said Jaime Czarkowski, 20, who’ll be competing in the duet as well as the team artistic swimming events in Paris.
But the goal is in sight now. The U.S. team is scheduled to begin Olympic competition on Monday, August 5. The team will compete in three events: a technical routine built around specific, required elements; a ‘free’ routine that’s less regimented and artsier; and the new ‘acrobatic’ routine that demands out-of-water lifts and midair somersaults. All are choreographed to music.
“Watch,” Fuentes said. “It will be such a great show,” with cameras above and below the water line capturing the swimmers’ beatific calm topside and wild eggbeatering and inverted twirling below. Each three-minute routine promises to be a distillation of dance, distance swimming, artistic gymnastics and damp rugby sevens.
Just watching, she promised, will leave you breathless.
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