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Artistic swimming is a crowd-pleaser and much harder than it used to be, but it has had to make the case that it is even a sport at all.
Aug. 7, 2024Updated 2:29 p.m. ET
Being an artistic swimmer at the Olympics takes a dancer’s grace, a gymnast’s flexibility, a deep-sea diver’s lung capacity — and a large packet of gelatin, dissolved in water and applied to the head like shellac.
“It can be a big stressor if bits of your hair start to fall out or your headpiece comes off,” the Canadian artistic swimmer Claire Scheffel said this week, explaining the pivotal role that solidified gelatin plays in the athletes’ elaborate hair and makeup routines. “We really need to keep it all in place.”
Artistic swimming is one of the flashiest, and oddest, sports at the Games — a sui generis mishmash of ballet, swimming and gymnastics set to dramatic music and performed with Cirque du Soleil-level theatricality by athletes wearing sparkly swimsuits and extreme facial expressions. It was admitted to the Olympics in 1984 under its original name, synchronized swimming.
Though it is a crowd-pleaser, it has continually had to make the case, at least to the general public, that it is even a sport at all. (The nadir in its quest for respect was probably that same year, when Martin Short and Harry Shearer played a pair of very bad synchronized swimmers, one of whom did not know how to swim, on “Saturday Night Live.” Don’t mention that skit to anyone in the sport; they’ll never speak to you again.)
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