As an amateur powerlifter, when I’m particularly passionate, I can probably picture myself standing on the platform at an Olympic weightlifting competition, but there are a few sports I know I would never make it to the Olympics, even if I quit my job today and dedicated my life to training. Since I hold my nose when diving into the water and struggle to perform simple synchronized dance moves like the Macarena, artistic swimming naturally tops that list.
nevertheless, Daniella Ramirez“My perspective is not necessarily universally accepted among audiences,” , a U.S. artistic swimmer who will compete this week in the 2024 Olympics, told me recently, because artistic swimming is literally the grandchild of the kind of performance you see in retro Technicolor movies: rows of glittering women in flower crowns diving sideways into a pool. Esther Williams Though she wasn’t practicing hard at the time, Ramirez said dealing with Old Hollywood could be extremely frustrating, and that it could sometimes lead spectators at home to believe the sport was much easier than it actually was (or, even worse, to view her and her teammates purely as sexual objects).
During Williams’ time, the event was called synchronized swimming, but sport officials changed the name to artistic swimming in 2017 to better align it with its sister sport, gymnastics.
And while most of us know we can’t do death-defying flips against top gymnasts, when we watch artistic swimming, the skill gap is somehow less obvious. “When you look at someone like Simone Biles, it’s easier to understand how tough her sport is because it’s a land sport and we understand the laws of physics,” she recently told SELF. “We tend to think of swimming as easy.” Essentially, Ramirez says, artistic swimmers perform all kinds of twists, bends, leaps, and inversions like you’d see on a mat, but without a solid foothold at the start. Seriously, they’re not allowed to touch the bottom of the pool. Ever.
Another thing that makes artistic swimming particularly tough is that swimmers are underwater and cannot breathe for long periods of time. 2 minutesRamirez said Team USA trains to manage this (e.g., doing CrossFit workouts with tape over their mouths), but still, situations can quickly get scary. To give one example, when Team USA swimmer Anita Alvarez lost consciousness during her performance at the 2022 FINA World Aquatics Championships in Budapest, images swirled on social media of her lifeless, sinking body and her fully-dressed coach, Andrea Fuentes, diving in to rescue her. According to a statement from USA Artistic Swimming: Post to InstagramFuentes noted that what happened was similar to what you see in other endurance sports, where Alvarez pushes his body to the limit to ensure victory.
