Synchronised Swimming is all about grace under pressure, as athletes use pinpoint precision and immense stamina to deliver beautiful routines in the pool.
Although it looks deceptively graceful from the pool side, Synchronised Swimming is an extremely demanding sport calling for great strength, endurance and flexibility. Swimmers use nose clips to help them stay underwater for longer, but the sport still requires tremendous breath control.
Every detail of the routine is judged and swimmers must be perfectly synchronised.
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| The photos I captured during competitions in Athens |
Despoina Solomou (18 Aug 1990) started at the age of 6 because she loves water, she loves swimming, so she finds this combination is adorable.
Evangelia Platanioti (9 Aug 1994) started at the age of 7 because she loves music, she loves dancing and she loves water. "It's something different from other sports" she declares.
The Greek duet took at the World Champions for technical routine the 11th place and for free routine the 10th. During the European Championships 2012 Evangelia and Despoina took the fifth place.
She and Despoina are trained by Natalia Tserneska since 2011.
For Despoina it is not her first Olympics, in 2008 she and her partner Evanthia Makrygianni took the 10th place in Beijing.
Sunday the 5th of August the competition of the women's duet starts at 5 p.m. (Greek time) with a preliminary phase, performing their technical routine and on Monday at the same time their free routine in an order decided by a draw before the event. The scores from each routine are combined to give a total score.
The top 12 duets then progress to the final on Tuesday the 7th of August, where another free routine is performed. The final scores are a combination of the preliminary technical routine score and the final free routine score. The duet with the highest total of these scores takes the gold medal.
Despoina and Evangelia qualified for the finals as 8th with 178.040 points. Leading is Russia (196.800), followed by China (192.810) and Spain (192.590).
Wishing Despoina and Evangelia all the best!
History of Synchronized Swimming
At the turn of the 20th century, Annette Kellerman, an Australian swimmer, toured the United States performing water acrobatics. Her shows proved very popular and a sport was born.
The sport was developed further by Katherine Curtis, who had the idea of combining water acrobatics with music. Her students performed at the 1933-34 Chicago "Century of Progress" Fair, where the announcer, former Olympic swimming gold medallist Norman Ross, coined the term "synchronised swimming".
Synchronised swimming was later popularised by American film star Esther Williams, who performed water ballet in several American movies. The competitive aspect was developed around the same time when Frank Havlicek, a student of Katherine Curtis, drew up a set of rules.
A relatively recent discipline, synchronised swimming became an Olympic sport for the first time in Los Angeles in 1984, with solo and duet events. These events also took place at the Olympic Games in 1988 in Seoul and in 1992 in Barcelona. Atlanta replaced them in 1996 by a water ballet for eight people. Since the 2000 Olympic Games, the Olympic program has included the team event and the duet.
Alongside rhythmic gymnastics, synchronised swimming is the only exclusively female Olympic sport. (Source: Olympic.org)
The results
At the final the Greek duet Despoina Solomou and Evangelia Platanioti became 8th with 89.360 points for their free routine, in total 178.560.
Natalia Ishchenko and Svetlana Romashina of Russia won Gold with 197.100 points.
Ona Carbonell Ballestero and Andrea Fuentes Fache from Spain won the battle for Silver (192.900) and the Chinese duet Xuechen Huang and Ou Liu won Bronze with 192.870 points.
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