Artistic Swimming

At the end of the 19th century, demonstrations of athletes moving in sync with music appeared at various water festivals in different parts of the world. In America, Canada and Australia, such performances, in which men participated at that time, were a very spectacular spectacle and were called by different names: figure swimming, artistic swimming and synchronised swimming.

The official international recognition of the new sport came in 1952, when the Congress of the International Federation of Amateur Swimming (FINA), held in Helsinki during the days of the 15th Olympic Games, gave it the name "artistic swimming", recognised it as a promising sporting discipline and created FINA, the Committee for Artistic Swimming. In 1956, during the Olympic Games in Melbourne (Australia), the first international rules were adopted, setting out the basic requirements for the performance of compulsory and voluntary routines, the criteria for assessing performance and the classification standards. In 1980, during the Moscow Olympic Games, it was decided to include artistic swimming in the programme of the forthcoming 23rd Olympic Games.

The international debut of the Soviet national team in artistic swimming took place in Split (Yugoslavia) in 1981 the same year at the 3rd European Aquatics Championships. In 1998, at the 8th World Championships in Perth, Australia, the Russian national team won all the gold medals in the World Championships for the first time. At the 27th Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia, group and duet competitions were held. The Russian team won two gold medals. Since then, the Russian national artistic swimming team has not been defeated at the Olympic Games. The Russian artistic swimming training school is the strongest in the world.