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Does ‘artistic swimming’ truly describe the world’s hardest sport?

Journalists in the 1980s routinely mocked what was then known as synchronised swimming – until they tried it themselves, and emerged from the water gasping in shock

10 August 2024

9:00 AM

10 August 2024

9:00 AM

Swimming Pretty: The Untold Story of Women in Water Vicki Valosik

W.W. Norton, pp.368, 22

Synchronised swimming isn’t really a sport, is it? It’s ‘artistic swimming’ now, of course, though many athletes don’t like that term precisely because it makes the Olympic event sound less like a real sport. But by the end of Swimming Pretty, Vicki Valosik’s meticulous history of synchronised swimming, it’s difficult to think of it as anything other than one of the toughest sports we’ve been watching in Paris – and wonder why anyone would disagree.

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