Why is synchronized swimming in the olympics

The 22 teams will compete Tuesday in the technical routine preliminaries. Skip to content. What is Artistic Swimming? That's because it's now called artistic swimming. Our redesigned local news and weather app is live! Download it for iOS or Android — and sign up for alerts. Tokyo Olympics Aug 1. Aug 1. From around , more jumps and lifts began to be included. A demonstration event at several Olympics, artistic swimming became an official sport at the Los Angeles Games and first featured solo and duet performances.

A team event was introduced in Atlanta in , and the duet performance restored at Sydney in Though the sport emphasises making routines look easy, underwater collisions are common in practice. Subscribe for our daily curated newsletter to receive the latest exclusive Reuters coverage delivered to your inbox. But she suspects it was a mixture of physical and emotional exhaustion, plus the specific movements at the end of the routine.

The day before the fainting incident, she and her team had missed qualifying for the team event in Tokyo by a slim 0. She had barely slept, and had just had a string of extremely long days in the pool. But pushing their bodies to the limit is all part of the deal for artistic swimmers, Alvarez says. Just consider their typical training regimen, which involves an hour of strength training and stretching exercises on land, followed by another 8 hours — or more — in the water.

Just knowing what we do in a day alone is enough to see how intense and really difficult it is. Sections U. Science Technology Business U.

Bodies corkscrew into the water, heads first, legs scissoring furiously through the air. A swimmer is vaulted out of the water by her teammates, pirouetting back toward a massive splashdown. Arms slice through the air in short, rhythmic bursts. Pushing back at widespread mockery surrounding the sport long known as synchronized swimming, officials rebranded it as artistic swimming before these Tokyo Olympics, explaining that it would broaden its popularity and make it more appealing to sponsors and television executives.

Allyson Felix breaks the record for most U. Audrey Joly of the Canadian team said the name change puts artistic swimming on par with artistic gymnastics, commanding additional respect. The sport requires not only precise movements executed in unison but also strength and stamina that can border on the extraordinary. That remains the case. Christopher Guest played their choreographer, chiding Shearer for overzealously jabbing his finger toward his partner.

Reflecting its continued status as a niche sport more than 30 years after the airing of that skit, the rules were displayed on the video board before the competition.