The Untold and Underestimated Athleticism of Artistic Swimming
Yes, that’s unflavored gelatin in our hair. You paint it on hot and it comes out with a hot shower. Yes, our makeup is waterproof, and no, it doesn’t come off in water. Now that we’re past the cosmetic questions, let’s get to the part of artistic swimming that almost always gets overlooked: the sheer athleticism it takes.
USA Artistic Swimming free team routine (USA Artistic Swimming)
I’ve been an artistic swimmer for 16 years, and I just finished my final season competing for UCLA. In all my years in the sport, the first thing people ask me once they find out I’m an artistic swimmer is almost always about makeup, hair, or glitter. It’s always confused me why people would choose to ask about something so superficial and frankly, irrelevant, when (at least to me) there are so many other obvious things to be curious about. For example, how do we lift people out of the water without touching the bottom? How do we hold our breath for so long? How do we stay in such tight patterns when we can barely see each other underwater? How do we train for a sport like this? I’ll never understand why people can’t seem to look past the shiny hair and sparkles when those are the least impressive parts of what we do—and yet, they’re always the focus whenever artistic swimming shows up in the media.
While the constant focus on hair and makeup over athleticism is frustrating, it’s even more concerning to see how artistic swimming is often mocked in the media. Even though the sport has evolved tremendously over the years, people often still reduce it to an extremely outdated stereotype. Things like the Austin Powers intro, while they are funny, paint a picture of the sport that couldn’t be further from the truth. For those unfamiliar with artistic swimming, this is the sport we currently participate in.
Now, after watching that, you might understand why we’re frustrated that decades of progress and athletic evolution still get overshadowed by outdated clichés.
As a woman working in sports, it’s always been my goal to create a media landscape that celebrates all athletes equally for their incredible accomplishments, especially female athletes, who are often the most overlooked. Instead of waiting for the media to cover my sport in the way I’ve been wishing it did for years, I’ve decided to take it upon myself to paint my sport, and all the athletes in it, in the way they deserve. From a freshly retired artistic swimmer who's spent 16 years upside down under the water, here is everything I wish people knew about my sport.
Artistic Swimming 101
Before we delve into the athleticism of artistic swimming, let’s first review the sport in general. Should you choose to tune into the World Aquatic Championships this week or any future artistic swimming competitions, this overview will give you all you need to know to follow along.
The Events:
At World Championships, athletes will compete in women’s solo, men’s solo, duet, mixed duet (one man and one woman), and team (8 swimmers). Each of these categories contains two separate events– the technical routine and the free routine. The technical routine is similar to the short program in figure skating, where each swimmer is required to incorporate the same fixed elements into their routine. The free routine, as its name suggests, has no required elements, resulting in unique choreography. The technical and free routine scores are then added together to create the final score and placement. The team competition includes a third routine, known as the acrobatic routine, which emphasizes lifts and throws. The overall team placement is determined by the technical, free, and acrobatic scores, all added together.
Scoring:
Stay with me here– we’re almost done with the nitty gritty. Each routine score is based on three categories: difficulty, execution, and artistic impression. Difficulty is how challenging the declared elements are, based on a chart with point values assigned to each move. If any of the moves aren’t performed exactly as stated, a basemark is given, setting the difficulty score for that sequence to 0. Think of this as a gymnast missing a connection on bars or a figure skater not rotating enough on an axel– it’s an extremely costly error that can move you several placements down. Execution judges how cleanly and skillfully those moves are performed. Lastly, artistic impression considers aspects such as choreography, musicality, creativity, and performance. The final score is a bit of a math problem: (difficulty x execution) + artistic impression - amount of synchronization errors. Essentially, the goal is to strike a perfect balance of challenging movements that can be executed well, combined with a creative and entertaining performance.
Now that you have an idea of how artistic swimming works, let’s dive into why it’s so hard.
Why Artistic Swimming Is One of the Toughest Sports
They Don’t Ever Touch the Bottom
One of the things that people are most surprised to know about artistic swimmers is that they don’t ever touch the bottom of the pool, like ever. Not only would it tank the score, but it is also virtually impossible to do so in competition pools that are so deep to begin with. So, how do they keep themselves afloat? When their faces are out of the water, they’re treading water with their legs, and when their legs are out of the water, they’re “skulling” with their arms. And what about those big throw lifts? That’s swimmers using their leg strength to drive upwards, their arm strength to lift the flyer, and their core strength to hold it all together.
2. The Breath Holding
Artistic swimmers have some of the best lung capacity among any athlete – they need it to get through their routines. A typical artistic swimming routine is around 3-4 minutes, and swimmers spend the majority of this underwater. So, in a 4-minute team routine, it’s pretty standard for elite swimmers to spend 3 of those minutes holding their breath.
An important point to note here is that simply holding your breath is much different than doing extreme aerobic exercise while holding your breath. Imagine you’re sprinting on the track for 4 minutes– you’d already be pretty out of breath. Now imagine that for those 4 minutes, you’re only allowed to breathe for 1 minute. While sprinting as fast as you can, you’d only be able to take a few breaths every 15-20 seconds before going right back to holding it in. That’s the reality of what your lungs go through in an artistic swimming routine, where you are holding your breath while constantly moving underwater. When you push your body to its limits like this, you definitely feel it everywhere, not just in your lungs. Because so little oxygen is reaching your muscles, your limbs become numb and feel progressively heavier as the routine goes on. Your vision might even start to become disoriented, an effect several swimmers describe as the “tunnel closing”. It sounds crazy, but it’s just another day for artistic swimmers.
If this seems dangerous to you– it is. It’s not uncommon for artistic swimmers to lose consciousness during routines or training due to pushing their bodies too far. You may have seen this heavily circulated photo of 3x Olympian Anita Alvarez, who fainted underwater at the 2022 World Championships and had to be rescued by her coach. It’s a chilling image, but it’s also proof of just how challenging it is to complete an artistic swimming routine and how much mental resilience it takes to push through it.
Artistic swimmer losing consciousness at the 2022 World Championship (Getty)
3. The Strength
As an aesthetic sport that is indeed pretty to watch, the strength it takes to be an artistic swimmer is often overlooked. Artistic swimmers don’t naturally float above the surface, so any time you see them sustaining height out of the water, whether it’s their legs or arms, they’re using their muscles to do it. Think of it as regular race swimming. These swimmers push water behind them to move forward; artistic swimmers push water downward to move upward. When their head are out of the water, they’re ferociously churning the water beneath them with their legs. When their legs are out of the water, they’re rapidly moving their arms back and forth through the resistance of the water, almost like doing an upside-down push-up over and over again. Throughout all of this, their core is constantly working to stabilize them and move them from position to position since there is no ground or anchoring force to rely on. For lifts, they are literally lifting teammates as if they were weights, performing overhead presses with an entire person balanced above their heads.
4.Flexibility
While artistic swimmers have to be incredibly strong, they are also some of the most flexible athletes in pretty much every way. To be a successful artistic swimmer, it's essential to have oversplits (right, left, and middle), a highly flexible back arch, hypermobile shoulders, overextended knees, and super-pointed toes. It takes a lot of work to both obtain and maintain these things, so artistic swimmers are constantly doing intense stretching– and yes, it is as painful as it looks.
Artistic swimming flexibility (USA Artistic Swimming)
5. Injuries
Although artistic swimming looks graceful above the water, it is complete chaos under the surface. Just like water polo players, artistic swimmers are always covered in bruises from colliding with and getting kicked by teammates in such tight patterns. While bruises are just part of daily life in the sport, the real danger comes from the risk of concussions. Lifts account for a substantial portion of the difficulty score, in part because they are very risky. They don’t always work, especially towards the end of a routine when swimmers are tired, and oftentimes the flier can come crashing down on the base or the lifters down below. These instances, along with other freak accidents like getting kicked in the head, cause more concussions in the sport than people would think.
Artistic swimming also fuels several overuse injuries due to the repetitive movements and constant strain on specific muscle groups. Most elite artistic swimmers struggle with long-term injuries in their hips, back, or shoulders for this very reason.
6. Musicality, Timing, and Choreography
With all the physical demands of artistic swimming, it’s surprising that artistry is still central to the sport. This is one of the reasons why it’s so hard. Not only do they have to perform the movements, but they also have to do so in perfect synchronization with each other (there is an underwater speaker, if you were wondering). They must choreograph their routines to earn the optimal amount of difficulty points, while also ensuring that these movements are creative and fit the music. While enduring one of the most physically challenging athletic feats, they are also remembering choreography and telling a story through their expression.
A perfect example of walking the line between artistry and athleticism is Team USA’s “moonwalk” at the Paris Olympics. They received points for executing difficult sustained vertical height, but they also wowed the artistic impression judges (and the world) by incorporating never-before-seen choreography that fit the theme of their routine so well.
7. Making it Look Easy
Perhaps the hardest thing about artistic swimming is making it look easy. No matter how tired or out of breath you are, you can never show it. Artistic swimmers can be on the brink of unconsciousness, but they will always come out of the water with a huge smile (or whatever emotion the music calls for). Remember that running example from before? Now imagine that you have to perform to an audience during your 4-minute sprint, smiling from ear to ear during those few times you’re allowed to take a breath. It would be much more difficult for you to do, but it might convince the people watching that you’re hardly fazed by it.
That’s the paradox of artistic swimming: the better you are, the less people realize just how hard it is. It’s a compliment when you’re told you looked effortless, but it’s one of the worst insults when people assume effort doesn't go into what you do.
Artistic swimmers are known to practice more than any other sport. They push through the most extreme physical pain and exhaustion, and they do it while most of the world still views the sport through the lens of glitter, hair gel, and outdated stereotypes about what the sport actually is. Clearly, they don’t do what they do for recognition, but I’d still like to give it to them as best as I can.
Even though I’ve stopped competing as an artistic swimmer, I’ll never stop fighting for my sport to get the recognition it deserves. Perhaps one day, kids will grow up being praised for their athleticism when they tell people they’re an artistic swimmer, rather than having to defend what they do against misconceptions and stereotypes. As you’re (hopefully) watching the 2025 World Aquatic Championships next week, I hope you see past the sparkly eyeshadow and instead see a display of one of the most demanding athletic feats.
Me! Swimming for UCLA at my second Collegiate Nationals (rokophotography)