Individuals immersed in the world of artistic swimming for years will be familiar with the three categories quintessential to the previous scoring system: Difficulty, Execution, and Artistic Impression. Each of these scoring factors remain important, but ever since the introduction of the Declared Difficulty (DD) system post-Tokyo Olympic Games, the rules governing the sport have undergone countless reforms.
Prior to this DD system, final scores were on a zero to 10 scale, with a total score of 100 considered perfect. No athlete or team ever achieved it, though a few nations occasionally reached scores of 99+.
Now, the system is open-ended and routine scores typically exceed 100, often falling into the 200 and occasionally 300 range. The new categories, Elements and Artistic Impression (AI), are judged by two separate panels, and officials called Technical Controllers assess synchronization as well as athletes’ completion of their Declared Difficulty.
International rule changes for artistic swimming used to happen every four year, most often after the World Championships held in the year following the Olympic Games. Consequently, the community was already braced for changes regarding the Figures and Technical Required Elements (TREs) after the 2022 season.
What most did not expect was the complete system overhaul and the introduction of new ways to calculate difficulty. Some, however, knew that these major changes were a long time in the making.
Spain’s Maria José Bilbao, former athlete turned coach and international-level judge, was a member of the Fédération Internationale de Natation (FINA, now World Aquatics) Artistic Swimming Technical Committee (TASC) until 2022.
She first identified a need for a more impartial scoring system back in 2013, when she was asked to give a presentation on difficulty at the FINA Worldwide Seminar on Synchronized Swimming.
“It was like an epiphany,” Bilbao said. “When you have to explain something to others, that’s when you realize if you fully understand or not. As an international judge, I’d arrived to the conclusion that I knew everything about the sport and I could [provide] information for this presentation. And I realized that we knew nothing about difficulty in routines. Instead, we were working by comparison, [saying], ‘This is harder than this, which is harder than this.’”
Shortly thereafter, Bilbao came up with a proposal to identify several categories of movements in routines and assign each to a level of difficulty. But while routines lacked a standardized method for evaluating difficulty, Figures in the age-group levels already had well-defined assigned degrees of difficulty based on the positions and movements they were composed of.
These had been created and assigned by the TASC’s Ad Hoc Committee for Degrees of Difficulty, chaired by Japan’s Homma Miwako.
“This is a group of people that have worked and defined the essentials in the sport, defined the difficulty of all transitions for Figures, as well as the calculations of the value of degrees of difficulty of Figures,” Bilbao said. “There was a very good job already done on that, and I thought, ‘Okay, maybe we can work with this.’ And that interested people.”
A group consisting of people from Spain, Ukraine, and Canada came together shortly after Bilbao made her proposal, and worked for the next four years on defining the movements that could make up hybrids and transitions.
The group often looked to sports like rhythmic gymnastics for comparison when developing their descriptions, but found it difficult to create written definitions for transitions because of the abundance of possible modifications. A transition from a ballet leg to a fishtail position, for example, could be altered by bending the top leg, or simultaneously rotating. As a result, it was nearly impossible for the group to come up with a singular definition.
“We tried, but it didn’t work at all,” Bilbao said. “To describe the routines was something like literature, like a novel. It was so long — and at the end, we had descriptions but not values.”
At the beginning of the next quad, the group showed its work to other judges and officials, many of whom expressed interest in seeing the ideas developed further. Canada’s Lisa Schott, now Chairperson of the TASC, suggested the creation of a formal committee to continue working on assigning degrees of difficulty to routine elements.
The resultant committee — called the FINA Innovation Group and chaired by Bilbao — was composed of members from Russia (Irina Butuzova and Olga Brusnikina), Ukraine (Svetlana Saidova and Anastasiya Petrenko), Canada (Kara Heald and Jackie Buckingham), and Spain (Ana Montero and Bilbao).
Butuzova and Brusnikina had been involved with a similar project around difficulty in Russia. Saidova and Petrenko provided expertise in acrobatics, a field which Bilbao described as a “blank slate” since the degrees of difficulty assigned to Figures did not apply. Buckingham, meanwhile, brought experience from figure skating, a sport from which the new artistic swimming scoring system would draw many of its basic concepts.
“After lots, and lots, and lots of work, we arrived at the conclusion that we needed to base our work in what was, let’s say, scientific — not arbitrary — in our sport,” Bilbao said.
That foundation came from the Ad Hoc Committee for Degrees of Difficulty’s 2017 report, which detailed its framework for determining degrees of difficulty for Figures, using the six Essential Synchro Specific Elements (ESSE): Sculling Proficiency, Center of Gravity and Buoyancy, Kinesthetic and Spatial Perception, Airborne Weight, Water Resistance, and Joint Flexibility. The group also looked at survey data from international coaches and judges ranking Figures and FINA Elements by difficulty.
“We worked with these essentials and with the existing DD tables of transition, which described all transitions and evaluated them according to the contribution of each essential part — so, how valuable airborne weight is in this transition, plus how much flexibility do you need, etc.,” Bilbao said. “From there, you build values.”
Building off those existing frameworks, Bilbao and the rest of the Innovation Group began separating hybrid movements into families. The original families included Thrusts, Rotations, Flexibility, Airborne Weight, and Connections. Within each family, different movements and difficulty levels were then established.
Igor Lazarev — the son of a Russian judge and a student at the St. Petersburg National Research University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics — helped the group to standardize difficulty values for hybrid movements by mathematically normalizing the existing DD tables for Figures.
The first version of the new system, released in September 2022, introduced the inaugural Hybrid Difficulty Table, which became the foundation for constructing Free Hybrids moving forward. Alongside the five families, the table also included various bonuses: travelling, angles, placement, synchronization, and pattern changes. Using the table, athletes and coaches would select movements and bonuses, combine their assigned values, and calculate the final degree of difficulty for each hybrid.
Additionally, basemarks — along with quantifiable synchronization errors — were created in response to a general feeling within the community that mistakes were not being adequately reflected in final scores.
A basemark is the minimum degree of difficulty that is applied — and that replaces the original DD value — when a team or athlete doesn’t successfully perform one or more components of the hybrid. Originally, a hybrid’s basemark value was determined by both the amount of time spent underwater and the number of movements performed.
However, the plethora of elements officials needed to keep track of quickly proved impractical in competition.
“You need to have your priorities. The technical controllers couldn’t control everything. We missed the pattern changes because we needed to count the number of movements. And angles — there were big discussions, that this is complex, this is simple, this is complex, this is not,” Bilbao said.
As a result, basemark values were quickly standardized to 0.5 for all free hybrids, while bonuses are now reduced to only pattern changes.
As the first competitions with the new rules began in 2023, another issue quickly arose. Initially, there were little to no restrictions as to what coaches and athletes could declare in their Free Hybrids, and they quickly realized the weight that difficulty now held. So, athletes began performing the same, highly-valued movements over and over to maximize their routines’ difficulty and efficiency.
“When we came up with the first table, the philosophy was that difficulty is something you increase [over time],” Bilbao said. “As times go and you get mature in this sport, you learn and you improve. Once you’re at the level of performance where you can do it well, then increase.
But at first, everybody was doing the same [things], and doing things that were crazy. Some competitions saw Free Hybrids that were composed of the same movement performed more than 10 times.”
In response, the TASC introduced guidelines as to how many movements from each family could be performed per free hybrid; restrictions which have evolved a few times over the past years.
Ahead of the 2025 season, the TASC further revised the Hybrid Difficulty Table, adding new levels and codes, and adjusting existing values in an effort to encourage more varied choreography rather than pure efficiency.
Laura De Renzis is a former swimmer who also served as head coach and technical director of the Italian national team from 2000 to 2011. She is now the artistic swimming coordinator for the Italian Swimming Federation. Current Vice Chairperson of the TASC, De Renzis has been involved in several recent updates to the Hybrid Difficulty Table.
“First of all, there is a huge respect for what was done before us to create the table,” De Renzis said. “I remember speaking with the Maria José and the [Innovation Group] many times when they worked on it, and thinking that what they were doing was [insane]. I really cannot overstate how much work went into it, it is crazy to think about it. Compared to that, what we do now is very easy (laughs).
We’ve continued to [improve it] by listening to suggestions from coaches and athletes. They were asking for certain skills to be added, for more variety, and we’ve tried to respond to that. We wanted to give more chances to use different skills, and to have more interesting routines. We also tried to adjust and give each technique its value depending on the time it takes to execute it.”
The second version of the Hybrid Difficulty Table — still in force today — helped introduce more variation into routines, but its early impact was still limited by how heavily difficulty continued to weigh into a routine’s total score.
Since the very start, the goal of this new system had been for Element and Artistic Impression scores to carry roughly equal weight in the final score. To achieve this in an open-ended scoring structure, factors were introduced — multipliers applied to each subcategory — to control how much each component contributes to the total result.
The TASC has continuously refined these factors year after year, especially as athletes and coaches have continued pushing the limits of the system and of the difficulty table, and discovering new ways to maximize scoring potential.
The most recent factoring changes in free routines ahead of the 2026 season further adjust the weighting between Element and Artistic Impression, with the aim of encouraging more well-rounded routines overall and a stronger focus on transitions.
“We’ve been using all the data that we have, and all our mathematicians have been working to create a balance,” De Renzis said. “We don’t want Artistic Impression to prevail on DD, but not even DD to prevail on Artistic Impression. People must be free to choose their strategy.”
The intended 50/50 split between Element and Artistic Impression scores in free routines is indeed meant to give athletes with different skill sets equal chances at success.
“If you have an athlete that is very artistic, you can use a lower DD to make transitions really interesting, really different. And if you have an athlete who is very strong technically, but not really expressive, then you can use the other strategy. It’s up to the coaches and athletes to decide which is the best way to go, whereas at first, it seemed like it was all-in on difficulty,” De Renzis said.
Bilbao further emphasized that a focus on execution can benefit athletes just as much as a focus on difficulty.
“A difficulty of eight and an execution of two means 16 — [you just] multiply. If you have difficulty of two and do execution of eight, it’s also 16. So, going for execution has the same value,” Bilbao said. “It is a shame that people often decide to multiply a high difficulty by a two in execution, rather than a lower difficulty by a great execution.”
Additionally, she stressed that swimmers should not aim for the highest DDs at the expense of execution.
“I really am sad when I see excellent swimmers that can perform marvelous things who, for the need to get high difficulty, are so low in height,” Bilbao said. “This is not fair. Not for the swimmers, not for the coaches, not for the judges even. Because for judges it is really hard to give low scores to people that you see have the qualities to do much better.
There is a middle place between so much and so few difficulty. There is a good place where you can have not eight, but four for difficulty — and get 10s in execution. For judges, it is wonderful, marvelous, to be able to give a score of 10 to a swimmer.”
At the same time, World Aquatics has also been rethinking how basemarks — which quickly became the most contentious aspect of the sport after the DD system was introduced — are applied.
Rather than something technical controllers actively search for in routines, basemarks should be intended only for clear and obvious mistakes; the kind of error even a casual spectator could reasonably recognize, within the limits of what is visible without knowledge of the declared elements.
“We don’t have bionic eyes,”De Renzis said. “So you really cannot distinguish [between] two, three degrees, even 10 degrees. But some things that are obvious, of course, [will receive basemarks]. Execution is another thing — execution is the judges’ task. Technical controllers need to decide whether it’s there or not there, not how well it’s done. The system was not meant to be a witch-hunt. The system was built to give all the athletes a chance, to be in favor of them, and not to punish them.”
Now that the artistic swimming community has had a chance to adapt to the new rules — and see the rules adapt with them — many hope to rediscover the competitive balance between difficulty, execution, and artistic impression.
Meanwhile, the Hybrid Difficulty Table is still very much a work in progress, and the TASC is continuously listening to what coaches, athletes, and officials have to say.
“These changes are coming from the base, not just from the top,” De Renzis said. “At every competition, there’s a QR code for giving feedback and suggestions; it’s for everything and for everybody. It’s a never-ending process, and we can always do better. It’s been great because everybody really wants to improve [the new system], and the community is really implicated in the process. Not all the countries or age groups have the same needs, so you really need to listen to everybody.”
ARTICLE BY MARI FLORES
Photos: Dimitris Mantzouranis
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