Anita Alvarez, the swimmer who fainted at three meters deep and risked drowning at the 2022 World Championships, overcame the heart condition that threatened to withdraw her from the competition and on Tuesday at the Paris Aquatics Center led the United States team to a memorable comeback in the free routine of the most stressful Olympic artistic swimming final of all time, according to the swimmers and technicians involved. “With the new regulations, artistic swimming has become, mainly, a very hard mental game,” said Anita, smiling as she left the pool after getting ahead of Spain on the second day of the three that will decide the team final. “But our coach has trained us to turn the pressure around and take risks without fear of failure, without fear of error and punishment from the base mark”
The coach who put the United States in position to win its first synchronized swimming medal since the 2004 Games is Andrea Fuentes, the most decorated Spanish synchro swimmer in Olympic history, who is currently the American coach with the help of her husband, Victor Cano, who was a gymnast on the national team and is an expert in developing the acrobatics that give Spain so many problems. It was precisely in the last acrobatic performance that the Spanish swimmers received a base markthe most feared penalty, the ogre of the new regulations. The norm foresees that six of the 16 judges, called controllers, specialize in monitoring that the plan of each routine submitted by each team is exactly what the swimmers execute. If there are discrepancies, points are deducted, as happened in the last Spanish jump. “The other countries have had a diver since she was little,” explained Blanca Toledano; “it was difficult for us to find one. In fact, we have been betting on captain Txell Mas for four months.”
After the technical and freestyle finals, there remains the final exclusively dedicated to acrobatics, another innovation in a regulation that has turned the tournament into a ring of fire for swimmers. It will be held this Wednesday to compute all the scores of a classification that, at the moment, is led by China with 712 points, the United States with 643, Spain with 633 and Japan, severely penalized yesterday with a base markwith 627.
“We can finish very high or ninth,” said Mayu Fujiki, the Japanese coach of Spain, before sending her girls into the pool in Paris. “With the old rules we knew more or less where we were going to finish. Now anything can happen. That’s why the key to the new rules is adapting to the change in hybrids, the leg movements you do in apnea, head down. You can train one thing one day and change it the next day. The team that is effective in changing will have an advantage.”
Knowing that the United States, Mexico and China have better acrobats, Fujiki raised the difficulty level of yesterday’s free routine to try to gain an advantage. The mistake in the last acrobatic was almost predictable, but perhaps it compensates. “It is a competition with a lot of pressure, excitement and adrenaline,” said Paula Ramirez. “The base mark “It makes the sport more fair because if you declare something and you don’t do it as it is, then you get a zero. It’s hard psychologically. But thanks to this we were able to win gold in Fukuoka and silver in Doha, and thanks to this the medals move from country to country. Before, synchro was very artistic, and now it has become much more strategic. Today we took a risk to produce a very difficult choreography.”
Anita Alvarez shrugged: “Sometimes I think it really is impossible not to make a small mistake that justifies a base mark. We practice every day as if it were a competition and we check our results. base marks ourselves”.
The girl who fell asleep at the bottom of the Budapest pool has made a comeback at the Paris Games. Now she is the obstacle that Spain must overcome.
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