SAINT-DENIS, France (AP) — With Russia out of the way, China is the new force in Olympic artistic swimming.
Twins Wang Liuyi and Wang Qianyi gave their country another gold in the sport formerly known as synchro, winning the duet competition at the Paris Olympics on Saturday night.
The Wangs built a lead in the technical routine the previous night and carried that momentum to a free routine dubbed “Gravitation,” performed to music by Dutch DJ Junkie XL and German film score composer Hans Zimmer.
They crawled around the deck in their shiny suits like a couple of spiders before diving in. A pair of soaring flips drew “ahhhs” from the crowd, propelling the Wangs into a nearly three-minute routine mostly spent with heads underwater.
“We developed very fast,” Wang Liuyi said through a translator. “But this actually happened over several generations of athletes. Everybody has the right to shine, but the previous generations in China fought very hard for us.”
The Chinese duo received a total of 566.4783 points, holding off two teams that claimed the first artistic swimming medals for their countries.
Kate Shortman and Isabelle Thorpe of Britain earned the silver with 558.5367, edging out another set of twins, Noortje and Bregje de Brouwer, who took bronze for the Netherlands at 558.3963.
“We’re such a small sport in the Netherlands,” Noortje de Brouwer said. “We hope to expand it. With the medals we have now, we want to see more girls and boys trying to achieve the same goal that we have. We hope to see them in the pool.”
From Sydney in 2000 through Tokyo three years ago, Russia won every artistic swimming gold medal at the Olympics.
But that run of domination was assured of ending after the invasion of Ukraine, which led to Russia largely becoming a pariah on the international sporting stage. The country hasn’t competed in a major international meet since.
The Wangs said it didn’t matter that the Russians weren’t in Paris to defend their Olympic titles, especially since the sport has adopted new rules designed to promote more athleticism and open things up to a wider group of countries.
“Our coach has stressed to us that in our competitions, it’s just ourselves,” Wang Liuyi said. “It’s nobody else. In the Olympics, we performed well in every single competition. That’s what we want to show the world.”
Clearly, it helps to be working with a twin in a sport where it’s all about being in sync.
In addition to two sets of twins on the medal podium, the fourth spot went to Austria’s Anna-Maria and Eirini-Marina Alexandri, who are part of a set of triplets, while fifth place was claimed by yet another set of twins, Ukraine’s Maryna and Vladyslava Aleksiiva.
“Our body shapes look similar,” Wang Qianyi said. ”The way we look during competitions allows us to give good artistic impression for the referees. We also live together. We’re interested in similar things. We know each other really well. Sometimes, all it takes is a simple look.”
The Wangs’ victory capped a stellar couple of weeks for their country at the Olympic Aquatics Centre adjacent to the Stade de France.
The 6,000-seat venue was the site of China’s unprecedented sweep of all eight diving gold medals, the last of which came just a couple of hours before the Wangs made their country 2 for 2 in the artistic swimming events.
The twins were also part of the eight-person squad that won gold in the team competition, building on a career that already included world championships in 2022 and 2024 in both duet free and duet technical.
“Under this new set of rules, everything could be possible,” Wang Qianyi said. “In this Olympics, for example, we have a lot of new athletes and new countries getting medals. We are starting afresh. We hope that in the future, we can contribute to the development of this sport.”
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