Synchronized Swimming Today Bears Little Resemblance to That of the Sport?s Infancy

Added: 12/23/2005

Synchronized swimming started as variation in the program of life saving training. But synchronized swimming today is much more than that. Modern synchronized swimming programs include duet and team events and only women take part in them. Events for women only came into practice only in the middle of the 20th century. Before that both men and women were performing in synchronized swimming.

The history of synchronized swimming development is pretty long and very interesting. Strange as it may seem but synchronized swimming started in the 19th century. Fist competitions were performed in 1891. But of course everything at that time was not like synchronized swimming today.

Synchronized swimming came out of special life saving courses and at first it was a demonstration kind of sport in which only men participated. The name of sport was also different - in most cases such names as ornamental, artistic, and scientific or figure swimming were in wide use at those times. And unlike that early synchronized swimming modern competitions include events for women only. Rules of modern synchronized swimming today are also much more complex.

And synchronized swimming today has duet and team events. Duet program has technical and free parts while team events include only free program. Preliminary (technical) part consists of predefined movements. And this set of elements is pretty strict and has to be performed in a special order. Duet can only choose the music to perform a set of elements with. Actual elements of technical program and their order are defined by the special synchronized swimming committee.

Free program for duets and teams may include different elements but of course there are also simple rules for this part of the program. For example, team during their free program has to use the whole area of pool. Some programs also include deskwork but this part of the synchronized swimming program should not be longer than 10 second. But these 10 seconds can help judges and the audience to understand the main idea of the performance. And for now judges do not take this part synchronized swimming program in consideration.

Different complex elements are included in programs of synchronized swimming today. For example, wonderfully looking air element when team members throw other members out of the water. Such elements look like high jumps over the water and they are very impressive. Almost all the teams try to include such elements in their programs although these elements are pretty complex.

In 1984, synchronized swimming was included into Olympic program. So, synchronized swimming today is an Olympic sport. And as long as synchronized swimming today is much more developed than before it is also pretty hard to judge synchronized swimming. Scoring system used in that sport is similar to that in figure skating. There are certain points and different penalties. These points are different for technical and free part of the synchronized swimming program. Usually there are two panels of judges (with five judges in each panel). One panel judges the technical part and different technical elements of free program.

And another panel of judges assesses what is called "artistic impression" of the synchronized swimming program. And of course, such a complex system is controlled by computers. Judges enter point by pressing buttons during the event and special software performs all the complex calculations. So the audience sees only the end results.

Rate this article:

Bad

Good

Article comments:

No comments for this article yet. Post your comment now!

Return to top of the page