Synchronized swimming isn’t really a sport, is it? Today it is of course called “artistic swimming”, although many athletes don’t like this term because it makes the Olympic discipline sound less like a real sport. But in the end Swimming PrettyVicki Valosik’s meticulous history of synchronized swimming, it’s hard to think of it as anything other than one of the toughest sports we saw in Paris – and one wonders why anyone would disagree.
Valosik addresses this question in her book, while also making a case for the sheer discipline and strength of a synchronized swimmer. Her art lies in doing both without ever sounding complaining or abrasive. Moreover, the story she tells is so remarkable that it doesn’t need forced drama.
Pretty swimming is also dangerous, and has been since women started swimming in tanks of water – some of which shattered, sending them flying through the air among shards of glass. Divers have emerged blind, their retinas shattered by the impact of the water. Esther Williams, the swimming movie star whose photograph was one of the most requested by American GIs, broke three vertebrae in her neck in a dive and nearly ruptured her spinal cord when the metal crown she wore pushed her head back and “sent lightning bolts of pain through her body.” Competitive swimmers have become unconscious underwater. Journalists in the 1980s made fun of synchronized swimming, then tried it and emerged from the water gasping in shock. “It’s the toughest sport in the world,” Dave Barry of the Miami-Herald.
It has been a difficult journey for these beautiful swimmers over the years, not only enduring the danger of holding their breath underwater and bearing the weight of the garments they were forced to wear to preserve their modesty, but also battling a society that largely believed that women simply don’t swim.
Divers surfaced blind,
her retina shattered by
the effects of water
They were allowed into the water to take a mineral bath, which was considered acceptable as long as they wore loose robes and stepped out of a bathing machine pulled to the water by a horse. Even then, men gathered at a distance to watch them through telescopes in what they called “naiad hunting.” Of course, it was not these voyeurs who were criticized. Valosik quotes a 19th-century London newspaper that chided women for “not confining their water games to bathing under the awning, but boldly walking away, thus exposing themselves to the vulgar crowd.”
The male gaze is a constant theme in the book. In the 1920s, when women first became lifeguards, they had to rescue men who recovered remarkably quickly – as in the case of the American swimmer Ruth MacNeely, who was the first female lifeguard on the New Jersey shore. One day, the scene repeated itself so often that
The manager realized that the men only wanted to be rescued by the young woman. After that, if a man got into trouble, he was on his own, because the beach manager ordered MacNeely to only help women and children.
During World War II, swimmers competed for wounded soldiers, and Virginia Hunt Newman was surprised to see so many of them leave the stands while she was diving. “She later found out that they had gone to the underground part of the pool to watch through the underwater windows, hoping to catch a glimpse as Newman adjusted her top after each dive.” She concluded that the men were not “as sick or wounded as they would have you believe” and that “it really made you feel part of the war effort.”
Swimming was extremely important in war: soldiers had to be good swimmers in case they ended up in the ocean. And to move quickly through water that could be full of debris, or to swim with just one arm while holding a rifle in the other, you had to learn synchronized swimming. In fact, it was men who turned swimming from something people did either as a feat or to save lives into a competitive sport. Top athletes today train for up to 14 hours a day. But the line between artistry and athleticism is still thin, and there are complaints about nose clips obscuring the “beauty” of competitors. Valosik, a synchronized swimmer herself, horrified her teammates when she insisted on wearing goggles at her first competition. “You can’t make eye contact with the judges with goggles on,” one told her. “You just don’t do that.”
What she does in this book is tell a comprehensive story of swimming without tiring the reader. Her writing style is lively and takes you into every single moment and then tells everyone else how hard this beautiful sport is – even if it sounds like a very big challenge to try.
