If you, a die hard Olympics nerd [enthusiastically thrusts hand into air], have been feverishly sifting through your TV guide in search of synchronized swimming these past few weeks with no success, it’s not just in your head: The sport no longer exists. Or, rather, it’s been rebranded to “artistic” swimming.
Though the name swap officially kicked off in Tokyo, not just in Paris, there are a bunch of reasons why it happened. After the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio, World Aquatics (artistic swimming’s international governing body) thought “synchronized” didn’t adequately describe the sport. Yes, swimmers are synched to music, but officials felt that a major component of every routine, the athletes mirroring one another, wasn’t reflected in the name.
And as anyone who’s ever tuned into these competitions knows, the performances are ridiculously difficult and acrobatic—artistry is only a single piece of what makes a team great. World Aquatics also wanted the name to draw parallels to artistic gymnastics, since the two disciplines are pretty similar in terms of judging: Teams are scored based on technical elements alongside artistic impression, minus any penalties. What’s more, World Aquatics set up a new scoring system in 2023 to de-emphasize subjectivity and put more focus on a routine’s objective difficulty in terms of overall points. (FWIW, gymnastics has followed a similar trajectory in placing more weight on acrobatics as opposed to artistry.)
Another important piece of this name-swap puzzle? Artistic swimming has a long, long history—the sport as we know it dates back to the early 1900s. Of course, back in those days, it really wasn’t considered a sport per se, but rather a performance. According to Smithsonian Magazine, you can see them in early vaudeville productions with silent film stars like Annette Kellerman, who’s often billed as the “mother of synchronized swimming.”
Still, Kellerman was a serious athlete and a testament to how tough these types of swimmers are—though she didn’t make it across, she’s believed to be one of the first women to try to swim the English Channel.
If you’ve ever spent the afternoon binge-watching the Turner Classic Movies channel and saw a bunch of grinning gorgeous women in flower caps side-diving into a pool, you’re probably familiar with the sport’s other famed parent: Esther Williams. She starred in MGM “aquamusicals,” which were considered water ballets at the time.
