If you’re an Olympic nerd [enthusiastically thrusts hand into air]If you’ve been frantically scouring the TV listings for synchronized swimming over the past few weeks and come up empty-handed, you’re not wrong: the sport no longer exists. Or rather, it has been renamed “artistic” swimming.
The name swap has officially begun in Tokyo as well as Paris, and for a variety of reasons. After the 2016 Rio Olympics, World Aquatics (artistic swimming’s international governing body) decided that the word “synchronized” didn’t adequately describe the sport. Sure, the swimmers swim to music, but officials felt the name didn’t reflect the main part of every performance: the swimmers mirroring each other.
And as anyone who has watched these events knows, the routines are incredibly difficult and acrobatic. Artistry is just one of the elements that makes a team great. World Aquatics also wanted the name of the event to have a similarity to gymnastics, since the two sports are pretty similar in terms of judging. Teams are scored based on technical elements and artistic impression, with no penalties. Additionally, World Aquatics is introducing a new judging system in 2023 that places less emphasis on subjectivity and more on the objective difficulty of the routine in terms of the overall score. (Incidentally, gymnastics has been on a similar trajectory of emphasizing acrobatics over artistry.)
Another important piece of this name-swap puzzle? Artistic swimming has a long history. The sport as we know it dates back to the early 1900s. Of course, back then it was thought of as a performance, not a sport in its own right. Smithsonian Magazine, Synchronized swimming dances can also be found in early vaudeville productions featuring silent film stars such as Annette Kellerman, often referred to as the mother of synchronized swimming.
Still, Kellerman was a serious athlete and a testament to just how tough this type of swimmer could be. Although she never made it across the Channel, she is believed to have been one of the first women to attempt to swim the English Channel.
If you’ve ever spent an afternoon watching the Turner Classic Movies channel and watching smiling, beautiful women in floral caps diving into swimming pools, you’re probably familiar with the sport’s other famous creator, Esther Williams, who starred in MGM’s “Aqua Musicals,” which at the time were considered underwater ballets.
