Unlike Gemma Mengual, Ona Carbonell or Paola Tirados, true divas of synchronized swimming, Andrea Fuentes Fache was never a soloist by vocation. Perhaps that is why, when she first decided to prepare a solo and found herself swimming without the protection of the school of fish in the middle of the pool, she understood that isolation imposed on her the strange duty of representing herself, that everything she had learned from her great references was no longer useful, and that to touch the hearts of the public she had to be herself. But who was she really? She found out during the year in which she prepared the choreography for the No, I do not regret anything, by Edith Piaf. When she was riding the bus through the streets of Shanghai on the way to the World Cup final, she put on her headphones and cried. Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, That note repeated a hundred times, that perfect structure, that gigantic and pure form, produced an untimely emotion in him. After all, he had just decided that he would dedicate his life to breaking forms, to shaking up structures, to challenging the laws.
“I hate patterns,” she said after the competition, with the silver medal hanging around her neck and her hair wrapped in a towel. “I really like breaking patterns. What’s better than being new at something? With all the possibilities in life to do things, why would you repeat what has already been done? Because of fear? Always fear, fear, fear…! Fear if someone points a gun at you!”
A year and a half later, she announced that she was quitting swimming. She was at the height of her career. After the 2012 London Games, she had won four Olympic medals. Having become the most decorated swimmer in the history of Spain, just when new advertising opportunities were opening up for her and she could finally exploit her successful image, where most people take advantage of the opportunity to make a leap to fame, she decided to retire. She devoted herself to horticulture and family. For years, tomatoes, cucumbers, leeks, beans, cabbage, aubergines and carrots had been growing in her garden, but from 2013 onwards she devoted all her time to them. She went to Mallorca with Víctor Cano, the gymnast on the Olympic team, whom she had met at the CAR, and together they had two children, Kilian and Sira. One day in 2018 she received a call from the United States. The oldest federation in the world offered her the position of coach, as if asking for help.
Until Russia’s invincible emergence at Sydney 2000, the United States had been the hegemonic power of synchronized swimming. Its creator, Esther Williams, the Daughter of Neptune, was born in Los Angeles. But that founding culture had disappeared in a whirlpool of vulgarity and indifference. After winning bronze in the team and duet routines at the 2004 Games, the Americans were left off the podium in 2008 and did not qualify their teams for the 2012 or 2016 Games.
Deterred by poor results, the best synchronized swimmers in the United States quit the national team to swim in the prestigious university league. Talents migrated to Stanford, Florida, Ohio State, Berkeley or UCLA in search of scholarships that would otherwise be inaccessible, and a competition regime that was practically incompatible with the training camps required to form a top-level Olympic team. Andrea Fuentes found herself with a depleted team in a federation that was losing resources at the same rate as it was sinking in the World Series and the Pan American Games. Confined to a pool in Walnut Creek, a small town in Contra Costa County, 40 kilometers inland from San Francisco, the setting that surrounded her looked more like the paradise of the Hell’s Angels than a high-performance center like those in Russia, Spain, Japan or Canada.
“At the first meeting with the team, I told them that one value we should pursue was to be transformative,” she recalled. “Above and beyond the results, I want these girls to revolutionize their sport. I don’t want them to walk the most traveled path.”
Californians
The results were slow to come. In 2021, the United States was once again left out of the Games and the Catalan rebuilt the team with swimmers far from the university circuit. To the foundation of Anita Álvarez and Daniella Ramírez, her two leaders, she added experts such as Jacklyn Luu, who had already finished university, and teenagers who were still in school and who made up half of the group. When the federation provided them with a pool in Santa Monica, Los Angeles, they saw the light only to find, shortly after, that the centre needed a major renovation. They literally ran out of water. For a year, while preparing to qualify for the Paris Games, Andrea Fuentes and Víctor Cano had to work hard to raise their children and find free pools to train. They became nomadic Southern Californians, moving day after day with the whole team because they had no fixed base.
“I don’t know what people from outside will see, but I guess there is no other option than to push yourself to the limit in many aspects,” she said, when she was a swimmer and asked about the allegations of abuse suffered by Ana Tarrés, the coach who coached her at the Games in Athens, Beijing and London. “To be able to win, you have to bring out the best in yourself. The best in yourself only comes out when you push yourself to the limit. People from outside can’t put themselves in our shoes because they would hallucinate. Some are mentally prepared to move forward without suffering and others live it as hell. Those of us who get very far do so because we enjoy the journey.”
“What Andrea did in the United States reminds me of what we did with Bet Fernández in Spain, 30 years ago,” says Ana Tarrés, the founder of Spanish synchronized swimming at the highest level. “In a way, she has taken up the baton.”
“Unstable”
It was Tarrés who discovered Andrea Fuentes, when during a talent detection process for his club, Kallipolis, he examined a group of girls from the French Lycée in Barcelona and saw her with her sister Tina. They had long legs, were strong and agile, and were eager to be in the water all day. Bet Fernández, her first coach at Kallipolis, says that over time her true strength was revealed: “Life is unstable, like competition, and she had a capacity for resilience that not many people have. Super empathetic, she loved to share, she had great peripheral vision and never went her own way. She is the least high-level athlete we have ever had. Because normally high-level athletes need to be selfish.”
Andrea Fuentes’s troubled American journey was just missing a major betrayal. It was provided by Anna Voloshyna, her second coach and the person in charge of the acrobatics, a critical section under the new regulations, when she announced last January, on the eve of the World Championships in Doha, that she was leaving the team to go with Canada, a direct rival in the Games. Far from adjusting to the script established by Voloshyna and repeating the known exercises, as the swimmers asked her, Andrea Fuentes chose to change everything and take them to unknown terrain. As Bet Fernández said: “She jumped without a parachute.” Her swimmers believed her. Víctor Cano helped them with the gymnastics principles. The United States’ acrobatics in Paris, a feat of improvisational ingenuity, were better than those of China. Thanks to that routine they won silver. It was the first American podium in the Games in 20 years.
Courage is her recurring theme. She once said that her favourite Zen phrase was “here and now”, because “you only feel fear if you think about the future”. As a child she wanted to be a firefighter and when asked what athlete she would have liked to be in another life, she let out her punk side: “Nadal’s balls give me strength”.
Named this week as the new coach of Spanish artistic swimming, Andrea Fuentes returns stronger at 41 years of age. The most legendary swimmer has surpassed her own myth.
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