Word – The Sport Flipping, Twisting and Pushing for Respect, Smiling All the Way

Being an artistic swimmer at the Olympics takes a dancer’s grace, a gymnast’s flexibility, a deep-sea diver’s lung capacity — and a large packet of gelatin, dissolved in water and applied to the head like shellac.

“It can be a big stressor if bits of your hair start to fall out or your headpiece comes off,” the Canadian artistic swimmer Claire Scheffel said this week, explaining the pivotal role that solidified gelatin plays in the athletes’ elaborate hair and makeup routines. “We really need to keep it all in place.”

Artistic swimming is one of the flashiest, and oddest, sports at the Games — a sui generis mishmash of ballet, swimming and gymnastics set to dramatic music and performed with Cirque du Soleil-level theatricality by athletes wearing sparkly swimsuits and extreme facial expressions. It was admitted to the Olympics in 1984 under its original name, synchronized swimming.

Though it is a crowd-pleaser, it has continually had to make the case, at least to the general public, that it is even a sport at all. (The nadir in its quest for respect was probably that same year, when Martin Short and Harry Shearer played a pair of very bad synchronized swimmers, one of whom did not know how to swim, on “Saturday Night Live.” Don’t mention that skit to anyone in the sport; they’ll never speak to you again.)

If Ginger Rogers had to do everything Fred Astaire did but backward and in high heels, then artistic swimmers have to do the sort of thing that gymnasts and acrobats do, but upside down while holding their breaths for up to two minutes at a time, often in sync with not just the music but also their teammates. One tiny slip can throw everything off. When their heads are underwater, the swimmers remain afloat by sculling with their arms; when their heads are in the air, they stay up by using a treading motion called the eggbeater. They’re not allowed to touch the bottom of the pool.

In 2017, seeking to broaden its appeal and add greater athleticism to the routines, the sport rebranded itself artistic swimming, put in place a stricter judging system that incorporated a degree-of-difficulty index, and introduced a third routine, acrobatics, alongside its familiar technical and free routines.

The sport is much harder than it used to be, in part because of its increasingly elaborate acrobatic lifts. The swimmers form platforms, or bases, with their bodies and elevate a teammate, known as a flyer, far above the water — whereupon the flyer might strike a pose like a standing split before leaping high into the air and flipping, twisting and the like back into the water. (Think cheerleading lifts, but in a pool.)

These are the first Olympics to admit men in the sport; each team is allowed to include up to two male swimmers. But while a generation of men is rising through the ranks and may be ready to compete by 2028, few have experience in team competitions. The result is that there are no men on any of the teams in Paris.

(The United States’ best male bet, the veteran artistic swimmer Bill May, 45, nearly made it to the Olympics but was left off the roster at the last minute. In an acknowledgment of his towering stature in the sport, May was introduced to the adoring crowd on Tuesday, opening the proceedings by rapping a staff three times on the deck next to the pool.)

The routines are hard enough. But the fact remained that even before entering the water for the technical program on Monday, Nuria Diosdado of Mexico spent a full two hours getting ready. That entailed gelatinizing her hair and corralling it into place along with an elaborate hairpiece; applying waterproof makeup vivid enough to be seen by judges halfway across the pool; and putting on a sparkly swimsuit that made her look like an aquatic drum majorette.

“It’s not enough to be good — you have to look perfect in your face, in your makeup, in your body,” Diosdado said after the Mexican routine, a rollicking homage to Freddy Mercury set to Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now.” “And you have to look happy the whole time, even when people are kicking you under the water. We might be smiling, but actually we’re acting.”

Theatricality and impression are part of the score, but the need to exude constant beaming delight — even when your teammate has made an egregious mistake or you have swallowed water, slipped out of sync or been kneed in the stomach — is a challenging element of the sport.

“It’s a weird dynamic, but, you know, we’ve been doing it our whole lives,” said Anita Alvarez, a member of the American team.

Consider the difference in demeanor between a marathon runner and an artistic swimmer.

“You see marathon runners at the end of the race, and they’re covered in pee and puke, and they’re barely able to cross the finish line,” Alvarez said. “But we have to make it all look effortless. Which, of course, it’s not.”

And while marathon runners are awarded foil blankets after a race and allowed to lie on the ground, groaning and clutching their hamstrings, artistic swimmers have to swim decorously to the side of the pool, breast-stroking in tandem with their teammates as if they were ladies at the club trying not to get their hair wet. Once poolside, they have to effect pleasant expressions and no sign of fatigue or pain while they wait for the score, no matter bad it is.

Every team at the Games performs three routines — technical, free and acrobatic — and each routine has its own theme and music. (The team finals are on Wednesday night; the duet competitions, made up of two athletes from each country, start on Thursday.) The themes can depict narratives, as in Spain’s world-championship-winning routine set to Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” in 2009 — if you look closely, you might spot the bustle in the hedgerow. They can also be vaguer and broader, as in Japan’s free routine (theme: chess) on Tuesday.

Not surprisingly, water comes up a lot as a motif. Australia’s free routine on Tuesday was “Avatar,” meant to show how the swimmers feel “at one with the water,” the announcer explained. The United States went with “I Am Water,” with a high-concept soundtrack featuring narration by Jason Momoa — Aquaman himself — and a routine that evoked watery activities like melting, rippling, dripping, gurgling and, of course, splashing.

The theme for the Canadian team’s technical routine was “Forest Magicians.”

“We’re really trying to give the vibe of the forest, of the powers that are within it,” Scheffel said. “We’re trying to take energy from the sun and the moon and the solar system.”

The swimmers’ costumes were festooned with feathers. “I think they’re meant not to be a particular bird, but more of a general bird,” Scheffel said. “The feathers really capture the forest vibe.”

The sport’s main features — the difficulty of the routines and the emphasis on appearance and showmanship — work in constant tension with each other.

“I think it just adds to the sport,” Carolyn Rayna Buckle of Australia said. Her team performed a jungle-themed routine set to Hans Zimmer’s “Volcano,” from the 2008 film “Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa.” “Not only is it a very difficult sport, but I also get to perform and put on a show. And people love to watch synchronized swimming.”

After a competition, the athletes have to attend both to their tired bodies and to their hardened hair, now covered with a thick layer of rubbery gelatin. If you want to see what it takes to get it off, Daniella Ramirez of the United States has kindly posted a series of TikTok videos depicting this less-glamorous aspect of her sport.

Nearly four million people have already viewed Tuesday’s installment, which shows Ramirez painstakingly peeling stray pieces of gelatin from her head. “The Olympic peelies,” she calls it.