I think that synchronized swimming has a lot of more evolving to do. It will get more and more gymnastic and hopefully more men will join the ranks.I hope that we within a couple of olympic games will see more mixed teams.

I will try to update the blog as much as I can to keep tabs on the major international competitions next year. So remember to bookmark this page and come back from time to time because the next year will be an interesting one.

The next big competition is the U.S. Junior Synchronized Swimming Championships. So note March 30-April 3 in your calendars.

I can see no reason for this at all. But the times are changing. Ironically in the early years Water Ballet was a men only sport. But the times are changing, today there are international competitions for men and also local competitions in several countries.

Unfortunately it seems that most of the men who train and compete in synchronized swimming are middle aged and slightly over weight. I seems lika most of them are doing this more as a political statement tan because they love the sport. There is also a swedish comedy about a group of men who train synchronized swimming called ”allt flyter” (Everything floats).

The current program has competitions for duets and teams, but previously there were also individual competition formats. Traditionally, the United States, Canada and Japan dominated, then they have won every single medal in 1984, 1988, 1992 and 1996. In the last two Olympics, however, Russia has won all gold medals.

Olympic and World Championship competition is not open to men, but other international and national competitions allow male competitors. Both USA Synchro and Synchro Canada allow men to compete with women. – Most European countries allow men to compete also, France even allows male only podiums, according to the number of participants.

If you want to watch movies with synchronized swimming you can have a look at YouTube, there are a lot of clips from different competitions but also homeshot slips from trainings etc.
Here you can find some nice animations of the differernt moves and posistione in synchronized swimming, http://assets.olympic.org/SportAnimations/en/summer/SY/SY_EN.html

You can also have a look at the official olympic site. There you can find clips from the latest olympic games and find results from official competitons, http://www.olympic.org/en/content/Sports/All-Sports/Aquatics/Synchronized-swimming/All-Synchronized-swimming-events/Team-Women/

There is a lot of information to find if you just give it a go.

But it was Esther Williams who male synchronized swimming popular through scenes in Hollywood films such as Bathing Beauty (1944), Million Dollar Mermaid (1952), and Jupiter’s Darling (1955). In the 1970s and 80s, Charkie Phillips revived water ballet on television with The Krofftettes in The Brady Bunch Hour (1976–77), NBC’s The Big Show (1980), and then on screen with Miss Piggy in The Great Muppet Caper (1981).

But it is still Esther Williams who is and forever will be the greatest mermaid ever to be captured on camera.

Ironically Water Ballet was a sport performed by men in its first days, it quickly became a women’s sport because the nature of the physical movements are more suitable to the female physique. In 1907, Australian Annette Kellerman popularised the sport when she performed in a glass tank as an underwater ballerina in New York.

In 1924, the first competition in North America was in Montreal, with Peg Seller as the first champion. Other important pioneers for the sport are Beulah Gundling, Käthe Jacobi, Marion Kane Elston, Dawn Bean, Billie MacKellar, Teresa Anderson and Gail Johnson. Many of the competitions in those days were still done in lakes and rivers.

There are  four different branches in synchronized swimming: solo, pairs, team and combination. A full team consists of eight people, but it could be down to 4 if you do not have enough people to cover the eight locations. The combination is one of up to 10 swimmers who swim both teams, pairs, trio and solo. One can thus combine the number of swimmers for the 5 min long program. If you are a youth or junior will compete in addition to its program in figures. Figures are when doing a combination of movements, without music, and alone in front of a panel of judges.

If you can get acquainted with how hard a program really is, one can draw similarities to other sports to understand. For example, you can compare it to swim 400 meters freestyle, or run 800 meters. Add to this that you can not show a trace of fatigue or lactic acid, you will always have a quiet and relaxed facial expression. Also, you have only limited access to air. There you have, roughly, how one feels during a program.

The sport draws heavily on swimming, but it is more varied and more fun. It requires, as in most other sports, and much hard training to get well. Synchronized swimming is not only fun to carry but also very beautiful to watch.

Examples of trainings for an synchronized swimmer at the highest level may be this:

Swimming
For fitness sake. Selection to the squad is done primarily by swimming test.

Figure Training

Review and refinement of the figures they will compete in. The characters are various difficult, depending on the working age.

Ballet
Develops suppleness and agility.

Gymnastics
For elasticity, strength and agility.

Strength Training
Helping girls cope with heavy loads of other people in the team, but also to get good heights.

Technique
Synchronized swimming is a sport that requires great technical skill and balance to handle all the different movements in the water. Therefore, some passports only consist of technical training to cope with spin, launch, etc. that they will perform with panache.

The contest consists of two routines, one technical and one free. The technical part is performed with a set of given moment according to a predetermined schedule. The optional operator can choose the artistic programming and choreography, at their discretion.
For every moment – technically and choreographically – parts judges out scoring with a maxskala on ten points. In the branches carried out by law, it is important for synchronization and perfect timing.