The 2024 Olympic artistic swimming team competition gets underway Monday, and for the first time since 2008, the United States is in the field. And not only that, the eight women representing the Stars and Stripes could realistically be in the mix for gold.
The competition begins with the technical routine, the first of three stages of the revamped team competition which includes, for the first time, an acrobatic routine in addition to the technical and free routines.
U.S. head coach Andrea Fuentes said she thinks the addition of the third phase will make the team competition more unpredictable than in years past.
“We’ve always been a little bit bored of how every competition we knew what was going to be the rank for years and this is the first period of time that artistic swimming has an unknown rank and everything can happen,” Fuentes, a four time Olympic medalist for Spain, said.
The addition of the artistic routine, which emphasizes airborne and platform elements, plays to Team USA’s strengths. At both the 2023 and 2024 World Championships, where medals are awarded for each routine, the United States finished on the acrobatic routine podium.
“We decided from the beginning to take high risk (difficulty), and we’re pretty proud of that because it has been opening the door to success since we have changed that,” Fuentes said.
Artistic swimming at the Paris Games will also feature an overhauled scoring system designed to make the competition more objective.
The United States will perform as the seventh of 10 nations in the technical routine, to the tune of Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal.”
The artistic swimming technical competition can be watched on Peacock and NBCOlympics.com beginning at 1:30pm ET, and on E! at 2pm ET.
SEE MORE: How to watch artistic swimming at the Paris Olympics: TV and stream schedule
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