On November 15, the International Swimming Federation (FINA) announced via an Instagram Reel that the Acrobatic Routine was added to the Olympic Games programme as part of the team event for 2024.

The team medal should now be determined by combining the scores of the technical routine, free routine, and acrobatic routine. Artistic swimming will still only have two medal events at the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris: women’s duet and team.

 

The Acrobatic Routine is a fairly new event in artistic swimming. Formerly named Highlight, it made its first appearance at the World Championships in 2019 and at the European Championships in 2021.

The event will see major changes in 2023 as a result of the new rules and scoring system. The difficulty score of this routine will only be based on acrobatics. Overall, acrobatics have been split into four main groups: Airborne, Balance, Combined, Platform. For the Acrobatic Routine, a total of seven acrobatics are required, and at least one from each of these groups must be featured. Teams are free to do any hybrids, but these will not count towards the difficulty score.

In the new rules, the number of athletes performing an Acrobatic Routine went from 10 to eight. Consequently, this does not change the number of athletes at the Olympics. Eight swimmers will be selected as part of the team, and will swim all three routines.

The addition of this event may however lead to changes in the 2024 Olympic qualification process.

Ukraine is the sole nation to have won all World (2019, 2022) and European (2021, 2022) titles in the event. Many of the top artistic swimming nations and typical Olympic medal contenders like Russia, China, or Japan, have never competed in this event.

This article will be updated as more information becomes available.

ARTICLE BY CHRISTINA MARMET

Cover photo by Andrea Masini / Deepbluemedia.

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