Following an exciting debut of the
new scoring system at the first stop of the World Aquatics Artistic Swimming
World Cup in Markham, Canada last month, the sport's global focus moves to
Montpellier, France.
At the Piscine Olympique Angelotti,
the world’s best Artistic Swimming athletes will be competing for top honours
in the eleven events contested from this
Friday through Sunday (5-7 May).
While Paris has been a regular stop in the Artistic Swimming series, for
Montpellier, situated near the beautiful Mediterranean coast, this is the first
time they are hosting a World Aquatics event.
Almost all the medal winners from
Markham, several World Champions, a few Junior and Youth World Champions, as
well as many other elite athletes, have arrived in Montpellier and are getting
ready to compete.
The number of entries is remarkably
high, another indication that everyone wants the experience to compete and be
judged under the new system prior to the World Aquatics Championships in
Fukuoka this July. For the past 6 years, the World Aquatics Innovation
Committee has been working on developing a new scoring system with the
objective to change the sport of Artistic Swimming to make the competitions
exciting and unpredictable, while making it fairer for the athletes, more in
alignment with other judged sports, and introducing the elements of risk and
strategy that will be able to change the outcomes.
“I feel that our sport is headed in
the right direction - that it is more exciting, more unpredictable, and that
athletes were in control of their declared difficulty - of their risk and
reward,” said Kara Heald (CAN) Rules Support Team member.
No longer will results be
predictable, and no longer will a human factor be judging the difficulty of a
routine. Now that the new system is implemented in competition, the Innovation
Team is not done, their name has changed to the AQUA Rules Support Team, and
they are continuously working to improve this new system to make it better and
to educate athletes, coaches, and technical officials.
"One of the biggest complaints
from Coaches was that they would make their routines more difficult over time,
but from competition to competition the difficulty score changed and even
became lower, even when it was the same routine," said Anastasiya Petrenko
(UKR) Rules Support Team member. "Now we have set values, there is no more
human factor. We can now compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges.
Everyone is in the same boat.”
“Although there may be further
education to implement, it’s fairer for all competitors. The athletes and coaches tried to include as
much difficulty as possible as that was definitely the priority within the
routines at this competition," said American artistic swimming legend Bill
May and Technical Controller. "It’s much more objective but also comes
with more consequences if the declared difficulty was not met.”
The Women Solo events this weekend
will feature the medalists from Markham: Ukraine’s Marta Fiedina Japan’s Yukiko
Inui, and Canada’s Audrey Lamothe.
Joining them is France’s Laelys
Alavez, 2022 World Youth silver medalist, and Austria’s Vasiliki Alexandri, who
finished in 5th place at the 2022 Budapest World Championships.
Fiedina was cagey when talking about
changes in training and preparation since Markham: “For now, this remains a
secret, since, now, one of the main factors of our sport is the effect of
surprise, therefore, our programs and preparation for competitions remain a
secret.”
Besides the changes in the scoring
system, the other notable change in the sport has been the addition of up to
two males in the Team routines, which has led to more male athletes competing
at the world level. This weekend the Male Solo events and the Mixed Duet events
have more than ten entries each. Last
year’s Super Final gold medalist, Spain’s Fernando Diaz del Rio Soto, the
silver medalist, USA’s Kenneth Gaudet, and bronze medalist Kazakhstan’s Eduard
Kim are all ready to show their routines in France this weekend in the Male
Solo events.
The Mixed Duet events will be a
showdown between the silver and bronze World Championship medalists, Japanese
brother and sister Yotaro and Tomoka Sato and the Chinese duo Yiyao Zhang and
Haoyu Shi, winner of the gold medal at the first 2023 ASWC. With the addition
of Kazakhstan’s Nargiza Bolatova and Eduard Kim and Spain’s Fernando Diaz del
Rio Soto and Emma Garcia the Mixed Duets events will be very exciting to watch.
The most anticipated events this weekend may be the Women's duet events.
With the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris
just around the corner, many countries are focusing on the available
qualification spots. The Olympic Games feature only the Duet and Team event,
and as such, for most artistic swimming countries, it is pretty much impossible
to assemble enough athletes to participate in the team’s event. There will be
twenty-seven duets competing for the three spots on the podium.
The historical win in the Free Duet
event in Markham by the Israeli duet Shelly Bobritsky and Ariel Nassee brought
the crowd to their feet. Since then, the reality of winning the gold medal has
settled in for the pair from Israel. Bobritsky shared that they did not expect
to win, their goal heading into Markham was to get on the podium. The pair knew
that their routine had a high degree of difficulty and that it would come down
to executing the hybrids correctly.
“The gold medal opened our appetite,
and we really want to improve even more," Bobritsky said. "We know
there are a lot of expectations now from us, so we work really hard to stay at
the high level we set in Canada and even go higher and better.”
The Israeli duo will have to bring
their A-game, as the field is filled with the best of the best duets. The gold,
silver, and bronze medalists from the World Aquatics Championships - Budapest 2022,
China’s Liuyi Wang and Qianyi Wang, Ukrainians Maryna and Vladyslava Aleksiiva,
and Austria’s Anna-Maria Alexandri and Eirini Alexandri, respectively. Also
present in this elite field are the bronze medalists from Markham Japanese Moe
Higa, and Mashiro Yasunaga. The debuting Italian duet of Linda Cerruti and
Lucrezia Ruggiero, who won the gold in the Duet Free in Markham, is not present
in Montpellier.
The Team events are set to be
spectacular, featuring China, Ukraine, France, Canada, Japan, Italy, Spain, the
United States and Israel to name a few. This stop will be another opportunity
for Coaches and athletes to perform their routines and to see how the other
competitors have made changes to their routines.
The program for the weekend for which
the results are on the World Aquatics website, and which can be viewed live on
World Aquatics YouTube. Here's what's coming up:
Friday, May 6th
9:00 CET Solo Free Women and Solo
Free Men
16:00 CET Duet Technical Women and
Duet Technical Mixed
Saturday, May 6th
9:00 CET Solo Technical Women and
Solo Technical Men
15:00 CET Duet Free Women
19:30 CET Team Technical
Sunday, May 7th
10:30 CET Team Free
14:30 CET Mixed Free Duet
17:15 CET Acrobatic Routine and Gala
Written by Maureen Croes, World
Aquatics correspondent
Image Source: Maddie Meyer/Getty
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