China won gold in the team artistic swimming event on Wednesday night at the Olympic Games in Paris, while the United States took silver and Spain bronze.
The medal ended a 14-year drought for the U.S. in the event, formerly known as synchronized swimming, and marked the team’s first medal since the 2004 Athens Games.
China dominated in the absence of Russia, which had won all the gold medals in artistic competition since the 2000 Sydney Games. China finished with 996.1389 points, ahead of the Americans with 914.3421 and Spain with 900.7319.
It was a big medal for China, and also a step forward for the sport, which changed its name from synchronized swimming a few years ago to modernize its image. Some swimmers still call it “synchro.”
“There’s a focus on the sport that’s never been there before,” said Adam Andrasko, president of USA Artistic Swimming. “This is a totally different sport.”
The smiles, the make-up and the hair gel remain, but this is no longer the water ballet under the flowered rubber caps that your grandparents watched. Wednesday’s acrobatic routines, following the technical and free routines of Monday and Tuesday, are a full display of female athleticism: strength, endurance and energy.
In the acrobatic routine, each team must perform seven elements above water. Seven times, a swimmer, known as a “flier,” is launched two meters (six feet) above the water surface in somersaults, spins and dives.
She is catapulted into the air from a group of swimmers who are not allowed to touch the bottom of the pool.
Tricks, more muscle routines and more buzz are now defining the sport, such as the viral Moonwalk routine – performed upside down with the swimmers’ heads underwater – that the Americans performed in Tuesday’s freestyle routine – a routine that earned them bronze at the 2023 world championships.
Rules and judging changes adopted about 18 months ago have turned it into gymnastics on water – with a dramatic edge like figure skating. The risks are also greater.
“People are pleasantly confused about how on earth these women can do what they do,” Andrasko said.
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The US wasn’t the only viral hit in Paris. Canada, which finished sixth, closed the event with an Eminem-inspired routine.