Canadian synchronized team is sixth in Tokyo, in an event where the name is one of the few things to change

Opinion

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This article was published 07/08/2021 (1519 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

TOKYO—It was said of Ginger Rogers that she did everything Fred Astaire did, only backward and in high heels.

Which, in a way, also captures the sexist disrespect shown to synchronized swimmers.

They do it mostly upside-down and holding their breath. In fact, they’re the most aerobically fit of all athletes. Ninety per cent of their work is done below the surface of the pool. Underwater TV cameras capture the churning legs, the sculling arms, the corkscrew upthrust of “pushers” — their job is to lift a teammate, the “flyer,” into the air for the execution of daring manoeuvres and dives, flipping, somersaulting, plunging, or descending regally, down periscope.

Audrey Joly is one of two flyers — the primary showtime performer, actually — on Canada’s eight-member squad, which Saturday night placed sixth in the team final after the free routine at the Tokyo Aquatics Centre.

“I’ve trained a lot of diving, trampoline,” said the 23-year-old from Saint-Eustache, Que. “I’ve been a flyer my entire life. I couldn’t push like Andy (Andrée-Anne Côté), she’s got really strong legs. It’s really specific. We all have a certain place in the highlights and we all have a certain job to do to make it really good.”

The event went entirely as expected, because that’s how synchronized swimming rolls: the Russians winning gold, China cinching silver, Ukraine bronze.

It’s almost impossible to crack through the rankings unless someone, say, drowns. Rather like ice dancing in figure skating, where placements at the Olympics and world championships are almost preprogrammed.

“It is really hard to move up,” Joly said. “So that’s why I think we’re really proud … that we did move up a rank. But as athletes we have to focus on our performance all the time and not on the judging and the scores and stuff.”

The octet had just filed into the mixed zone, an assembly of red and silver sequins in their Maple Leaf spangled bathing suits. Their routine was titled “Triumph,” something about the triumph of Canada, something … “I don’t really know,” Joly admitted, awkwardly. Their hair was excessively gelled, almost laminated, and pulled into crowning headpieces. Their makeup was dramatic, though not as startling as the red eyeshadow on the Chinese women. The nose plugs were removed.

This reporter was having a hard time keeping their names and quotes straight. If I make a mistake, just DQ me. Like the Greek team. (The Greeks didn’t start, actually, because four of the swimmers had tested positive for the coronavirus, and there went their Olympics. They were removed from the athletes village and shunted off to isolate in a hotel.)

But I do want to get all their names in, for the record: Joly, Côté, Jacqueline Simoneau (the only one with previous Olympics experience) Claudia Holzner (who was fifth in the duet with Simoneau on Wednesday), Emily Armstrong, Rosalie Boissoneault, Halle Pratt and Camille Fiola-Dion.

Simoneau, by the way, has been timed holding her breath for five minutes and 11 seconds. Is that some kind of record? “No, a surfer beat me out.”

It’s easy to mock the sport, and many do. The rictus smiles, the Ziegfeld Follies theatrical showgirl echo and Esther Williams Hollywood aqua-musical feel don’t help, with synchronized swimming tracing its entertainment provenance to the 1934 Chicago World’s Fair. So the kitsch element is bred in the breed. Canadian swimmers have tried to break the pattern in the past. In London 2012, they had a sassy and non-conformist routine with an acrobatic motif based on Cirque du Soleil that audiences loved; at another Games, the squad eschewed all showbiz elements, wore plain black swimsuits and put the focus on their athleticism in the best routine I’ve ever seen, ingeniously depicting all the Olympic sports in their eye-popping moves. On neither occasion were they rewarded by the judges.

It’s tremendously hard work at the elite Olympics level.

“A lot of people compare it to doing a sprint, a running sprint on the track, but holding your breath while you’re doing it,” Joly said. “It builds up the lactic acid in your body. And then you have to smile while you’re doing it, too. People that don’t know the sport don’t know everything that’s going on under the water, as well. That’s what makes it a really complicated and hard sport.”

Simoneau: “A good analogy would be a duck. You see a paddling duck but on the surface of the water they’re nice and smooth. That’s what we want to portray.”

Armstrong: “It takes a lot of practice. That’s why we do so much training, run-through. Building up our endurance so that we can practise having that breath control for when we perform and be able to smile.’’

But why must you wear that frozen smile all the time?

“Because we get judged on artistic impression,” Côté said. “In a routine, you can be smiling, you can be emotional, you can be mad, you can be sad, but you have to send the emotion that you’re feeling to the judges.”

Synchronicity and unison, counting off the beats as dancers do. Although so many of the above-water movements, leg thrusts, choreographed arms, daisy chain constructs, look — to an outsider anyway — unattractively rigid and jerky.

“It’s easier to make it synchronized when you’re more precise like that,” Armstrong said. “It’s easier to make everyone look the same when you’re hitting the movement on the same counts. It helps to bring the overall synchronization, the look of the team, together and similar.”

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At this point I should note that the sport is not even called synchronized swimming anymore. It was rebranded artistic swimming in 2017, reportedly on the insistence of IOC president Thomas Bach. A furious backlash ensued. Removing “synchro” erased the very essence of the sport and “artistic” detracted from its athleticism.

These women either don’t have an opinion on that subject or don’t wish to share it. You learn how to (pointed) toe the line in synchro. Pardon, artistic.

Sixth at the Olympics, and proud of it.

Joly: “We left our souls in the pool.”

Rosie DiManno is a Toronto-based columnist covering sports and current affairs for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @rdimanno