Synchronised Swimming or Artistic Swimming?
What is artistic swimming?
Ahead of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, FINA, the world governing body for the sport, decided that the discipline of synchronised swimming would be renamed as artistic swimming.
The Swim England website has more information.
The name of the discipline was therefore changed by Swim England and subsequently by Swim England East Region. The county has followed this lead and changed the name of the discipline from synchronised swimming to artistic swimming.
Artistic Swimming
In Swim England Hertfordshire the clubs offering artistic swimming are either named synchronised swimming or artistic swimming clubs, or are sections of swimming clubs which offer the discipline.
Currently Swim England Hertfordshire holds Artistic Swimming Championships, within the Swim England East Region Artistic Swimming Championships.
Athletes in the discipline of artistic swimming can progress via county and regional competition to national level championships.
Generally artistic swimming competitions are split into figures and routines. All swimmers have to compete in figures but there are usually limits as to how many routines a club can enter into each category. Routine categories are solo, duet and team. With figures, each category has three of four figures which they complete with each figure watched by a panel of five judges. The highest and lowest scores are deducted and an average of the other three marks is used along with taking into account the degree of difficulty of the figure.
Officials
Artistic Swimming events require referees, judges, scorers, callers, clerks and timekeepers as well as other helpers to run.
The Region runs courses for level 1 and 2 judges as well as courses for scorers.
No technical knowledge is required for callers, clerks and timekeepers and parents often fill these essential roles to enable competitions to run.
Find out more about artistic swimming official’s training courses.
Contact the Artistic Swimming Manager, Tom Brennan