For some sports on the Olympic program, it’s easy to understand how they evolved: Swim fast, run fast, jump high, score a goal. But sports like artistic swimming? Where did that come from? On this episode of the podcast, we talk with Vicki Valosik, author of Swimming Pretty: The Untold Story of Women in Water, who delved deep in to the world of synchronized swimming to discover its roots–and along the way, she found much more.
At the Olympics, synchronized swimming was added to the program at LA 1984 as a women’s sport and had two events: solo and duet, the solo being added after the Soviet Union boycotted the Games. At Atlanta 1996, the solo and duet were replaced by a team event, and the sport was still only for women.
The duet returned for Sydney 2000, and the two events are still on the Olympic program today; however, more changes were in store. Ahead of the Tokyo 2020 Games, the sport changed its name to artistic swimming (Vicki notes that the synchro community has thoughts on that!). For Paris 2024, the sport underwent a lot of changes, including a new code of points and the addition of men to teams.
Although men were now allowed onto teams, at Paris 2024, none of the entries included a man on their roster. Vicki talks with us about the reasons why it’s so difficult to drop a man onto a team, and when we might see one compete at the Olympics.
The book is a treasure trove of rabbit holes, from the connection Benjamin Franklin had to the sport, to water-based lifesaving techniques used by the military. Vicki dives into the lives of the sport’s pioneer Annette Kellerman and movie star Esther Williams as she traces the history of the sport from its earliest days to the Olympic stage.
When synchronized swimming debuted at the LA 1984 Olympics, ABC hired Donna de Varona and Esther Williams as commentators, and the sport was quite different from what we see today. For example, a figures element was part of the overall score:
As the sport’s evolved, the team competition has brought difficulty to new heights, and Vicki talks with us about some of the changes in the sport that have made it more dynamic–and more dangerous. Remember this moment, when US artistic swimmer Anita Alvarez nearly drowned after competition?
Swimming Pretty is a fascinating read, and it gives a lot of insight into the women–and men–who developed this sport, helped women discover their athletic capabilities, and encouraged people to embrace going into the water.
You can find out more about Vicki Valosik at her website. Follow her on Insta, Facebook, and X!
Also on today’s episode, Zeus the horse from the Paris 2024 Opening Ceremony is now at Versailles for an exhibit. In Melbourne, someone’s created another statue–of infamous breaking athlete Raygun.
It’s just 500 days to go until the Milan-Cortina 2026 Paralympics! In other Milan-Cortina 2026 news, Poste Italliane has signed on as a sponsor, and the organizing committee announced the producers of the ceremonies and torch relay.
Milan-Cortina will be a regional Games, and LA 2028 may turn out to be that way too. We already know that softball and canoe slalom will be held in Oklahoma City, and now cricket may also take place outside of Southern California.
Plus, we have some legacy news and updates from TKFLASTANIs:
- Para triathlete Grace Norman
- Sprinter Kenny Bednarek
- Sled hockey player Monica Quimby
- Para swimmer Olivia Chambers
- Race walker Evan Dunfee
We’ll be at the Olympin show in Atlanta on November 8-10. Stop by the Marriott Atlanta Buckhead Hotel and Conference Center and see us!
Thanks so much for listening, and until next time, keep the flame alive!
Note: Where possible, we use affiliate links. If you purchase something through one of these links, we may earn a commission.
TRANSCRIPT
Note: This is an uncorrected machine-generated transcript and may contain errors. Please check its accuracy against the audio. Do not quote from the transcript; use the audio as the record of note.
364-Swimming Pretty with Author Vicki Valosik
Theme Music
Jill Jaracz: Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keep the Flame Alive, the podcast for fans of the Olympics and Paralympics.
If you love the games, we are the show for you. Each week we share stories from athletes and people behind the scenes to help you have more fun watching the games. I am your host, Jill Jaracz, joined as always by my lovely co host, Alison Brown. Alison, hello. How are you?
Alison Brown: Hello. I have been listening back to some old episodes because we were putting together a submission for an award.
Theme Music: Yes.
Alison Brown: And I’ve been, and I have to apologize to you because on two episodes, I was really mean to you. Once during our, um, world game coverage, I accused you of hating children.
Jill Jaracz: Oh, well, you know, and,
Alison Brown: and then on another world games, the second episode, I went into a whole tirade about, um, the Yule log.
Cause you didn’t like the electronic cauldron. I’m watching the Cauldron on TV, and I went into this whole several minutes of tirade about the Yule Log from the 1970s. So I
Jill Jaracz: am sorry. This is from the Youth Olympic Games, not the World Games.
Alison Brown: Excuse me, yes, yes, I apologize. Yeah, the Youth Olympic Games.
Jill Jaracz: Fun coverage from earlier this year.
Yes! Can’t believe that was earlier this year.
Alison Brown: Me too, as I was going through the list of episodes from this year, I’m like, oh yeah, the, the winter youth Olympic games that happened and see, I got myself confused, but yeah, so I’m sorry. That was really mean.
Jill Jaracz: That is quite all right. Um, yes, so we are putting together a submission for the sports podcast awards, which have put back in Olympics and Paralympics podcast category.
So, uh, you will probably hear us asking you to vote for us. Hopefully, if we make it through to the shortlist of podcasts, that is another one that is a popularity vote that helps. When we’ve asked you to vote for us for the women in podcasting awards, and we sadly did not win that one. That was a complete popular vote, but we know that a lot of you supported us and we really appreciate that.
So thank you for believing in us and for being there and for voting. And, maybe we’ll get them next time.
Alison Brown: Even though I’m so mean to you.
Jill Jaracz: They didn’t know that. The women in podcasting awards didn’t know that.
Also give a thank you to our patrons for supporting the show financially you keep our flame alive for sure I have put up a little bit of extra Paris content for those of you at the 5 and up on Level, and, we are getting ready to put together a little project for next year’s patrons special episodes, which I’m kind of excited about.
Oh, it’s going to be fun. We will detail that for you shortly. I still have some Paris things that I need to put together. So there will be just stuff dropping as, time goes on. So be on the lookout for that. And today we are dropping a hot, hot interview with you. Well, it’s not that hot because it’s in the pool.
That’s right. That’s right. Except for when they put fire in the pool, you know,
Vicki Valosik Interview
Jill Jaracz: today we are talking artistic swimming with Vicki Valosik, author of the book, Swimming Pretty, the untold story of women in water, which came out earlier this year. Vicki is a journalist who’s written for many national publications, and she’s also the editorial director and a writing teacher at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. Most importantly, she herself is a master’s artistic swimmer who took up the sport as an adult and became interested in the history of it, or synchronized swimmer, because there’s a lot of controversy over, do you call it synchro? Do you call it artistic? So it could be synchro.
The book goes back to the early days of what they called pretty swimming When Ben Franklin of all people had a hand at creating the movements that evolved into the competitive sport We know today Vicki traces the development of the pretty swimming Water ballets life saving techniques theorized , the rise of Aqua Cades and Esther Williams movies, as well as the competitive sport we watched today at the games.
It is a fascinating read and an eye popping look at how this sport, which, you know, it’s often on the back burner at the Olympics, but it’s one of the most difficult to compete in. So take a listen to our conversation with Vicki.
Jill: Vicki Valosik, thank you so much for joining us. You wrote Swimming Pretty, The Untold Story of Women in Water. We want to start of at the end, with men being allowed to compete in the Olympics for the first time in 2024.
But no team ended up including a man. and obviously your, your book deadline was before that decision was made. So how did you broach the subject of men being included in the sport? And what did you think of well, what transpired in countries choosing their teams for 2024?
Vicki Valosik: Well, it was interesting because yeah, the decision came out.
And so I had been, all these years working on a book about one of only two women’s only sports in the Olympics. And that was sort of a guiding thing. And then this decision came out that I was actually really happy about, of course, as I was finishing the book, but then not knowing how things would go.
Also not knowing if America would qualify. So it was like this just sort of trying to. write the ending in a way that wouldn’t feel dated later on, but also, you know, I didn’t know what the future would be. So, you know, I, I knew that Bill May was going to come out of retirement. He was a, already had come out of retirement by the time I was finishing the book.
And, Most people I think we’re really hoping to see him on the team. But of course, the national team coaches had to choose the group they thought fit best and worked best together. so it’s disappointing to see someone who’s, worked so hard and could have attained this dream had things changed a little bit earlier, you know, had this decision come out by the IOC a decade ago.
You know, it was interesting to see this monumental decision and then it sort of become almost a non story, you know, like oh my gosh Men are gonna be included and we’ve got these men coming out of retirement who are so thrilled and then to not have men And I I did interview Bill a few times for the book including once around that time that these decisions were coming out And he pointed out that there had not been really enough time for men to prepare because the decision coming out in late 2022, and up to that point, you’d only had men able to compete in mixed duets at the international level.
So, most men who were on national teams or. You know or competing at that level. We’re only doing mixed duets. So it’s very different when you have to swim with one other person or swim a solo versus swimming in a team of eight And maintaining your spot in that team and it’s just a whole different beast. So he pointed out to me that there hadn’t been a lot of time for these male athletes to get experience doing that because of course national teams weren’t putting men in their team routines If there was no chance they were going to the Olympics.
So even those who did sort of make that decision to to try for it. It didn’t have a lot of time to train. So, you know, it’s it’s not that these male athletes on the national teams weren’t at the caliber of the female athletes. They were training with, but they, in most cases, hadn’t been training in team routines nearly as long.
So there was a, they were catching up in a sense. So I think that by L. A. A. We will definitely see men in the Olympics. Well, I shouldn’t say definitely but hopefully because you know now There’s no reason not to include men in the team routines at this point, you know, because they know there’s no glass ceiling that they’re, that’s going to stop them before the Olympics.
Alison: I was curious if this was any kind of conflict between, say, what the IOC wanted in terms of, gender equity, and what the artistic swimming officials prefer, prefer to see. for their sport. was there, you have to have men, but we don’t really want to put men in the team competition.
Vicki Valosik: I honestly don’t think that was the case.
I, you know, from what I’ve seen inside the sport, most people were really happy about the decision. It could be there is a little bit of hesitancy on the parts of coaches and choreographers, just because it does, as Bill explained to me, take like a certain level of creativity and willingness to think outside the box, because you’re not going to have with body types that different eight people matching perfectly.
So you sort of have to come up with a creative way to incorporate that person intentionally rather than trying to hide them and make them look like everyone else. So that can be, you know, a really big shift and how you’ve always done choreography and how you sport that’s all about synchronization and matching.
So that maybe some choreographers, some coaches felt there wasn’t time to sort of make that huge shift in thinking and style of coaching, but I don’t think it was that people weren’t happy about the decision. I think they definitely were, but it is might take some time to figure out how to start to deal with different styles of body types in these routines going forward.
Alison: Yeah. Unless you’re China who basically cut and paste their swimmers.
Vicki Valosik: Yeah.
Alison: That would cause that was one of the teams that I did see in person and those girls were. I don’t know where they found eight exact matching women Like that as opposed to the other teams that just kind of Have to make those adjustments
Vicki Valosik: Interesting.
Yeah,
Jill: let’s talk a little bit about the irony with the debate of having men in the sport today versus the origins of the sport come from men in a way as you traced in the book, so I think how do men be the proponent of this and then fade away and then now start to make inroads again?
Vicki Valosik: That was such a fascinating thing to, to learn about that these moves, as you said, they originated with men in the 1500s, but I mean, that was also because women weren’t allowed to swim. I mean, it wasn’t that, and men were just doing these amazing things women couldn’t do. Women were, strictly restricted to bathing, if anything, in the 1500s, and then.
You know, it took a long, long time really till the late Victorian era for that to change. And really when it did change, it was that women were accepted as swimming performers largely before they were accepted as swimming athletes. You know, as Agnes she, you know, set a record swimming from London to Greenwich.
And was sort of fetid and celebrated. But then the news, there was this backlash, of course, in the newspaper saying, okay, go back to what girls are good at. go back to your little aquarium, teach other girls to swim. We don’t want to see you out here making a spectacle of yourself as an athlete. but then she was widely accepted, had a great career as a performer.
So that was really the beginning of these sorts of moves becoming seen as a domain for women. And of course that just escalated with Busby Berkeley, Billy Rose Aquacades, Esther Williams, all of these styles of, swimming showgirl entertainment that really made synchronized swimming start to become associated with not just women, but with a hyper feminine form of, women’s sport.
Also, as I write in the book, it was really some particular ideas around female sport and physical education that were developing in the twenties and thirties that also enabled it to become synchronous when we become a sport that excelled for women in particular, because there weren’t a lot of other options for women’s sports that they were, varsity sports were declining in the twenties and thirties, and for women and, they were thought to be, you know, sports for women should be collaborative. They shouldn’t be super competitive, they should be appropriately feminine and graceful. So that sort of just created a, a great place for synchronized swimming to thrive in the world of women’s physical education.
Whereas men didn’t need that. They had varsity swimming and speed competitions, endurance competitions that a lot of women’s schools didn’t have. So all of these things just made it really both be seen as feminine and also just an opportunity that was there for women when men had a lot of other opportunities.
So it sort of, grew into a women’s sport, even though, as I write, the very first competition was co ed in Chicago in 1939, For these reasons, it really prospered as a women’s sport and became seen over the decades as something for women, and ironically, in the Title IX era, that actually helped it get Olympic acceptance.
For years and years, it was dismissed as, oh, this is just a performance. This is, something Esther Williams did. But then when, Um, the IOC was looking to add more women’s sports. Suddenly, you have, Oh, well, here’s this sport that’s all women, right? Let’s accept it. That will help us boost our numbers of women.
Alison: I love a book that includes disparaging remarks of Avery Brundage. So I appreciate throwing in some, yes, he hated, any sport that was judged and he was very anti women in sports.
So talk a little bit about that getting into the Olympics moment, because I remember it. And I remember people talking a lot about it coming from the showman aspect of it, but it was a collegiate sport that really surprised me.
Vicki Valosik: Yes, it had been a prospering collegiate sport really since title nine. some of the schools, in that era that it had these sort of performative synchronized swimming clubs once, you know, there was funding and the motivation to turn some of these women’s clubs into varsity sports, a few. Schools, particularly Arizona and Ohio really got ahead of the curve and started giving athletic scholarships to their swimmers.
So, it was really began thriving in the world of collegiate sports, and that’s where some of the top athletes were actually coming from getting back to Avery Brundage. Yeah, he just, he couldn’t see it as anything, but Esther Williams, I think. Also, I never saw evidence of him. disparaging it because it was a woman’s sport, but there’s definitely evidence that he didn’t want women in the Olympics in the first place.
So he sure didn’t want this all women’s sport that was, you know, in his perspective, performative. I’m sure he never tried it and seen how hard it was. So, yeah, it wasn’t until after he retired from his very long tenure as head of the IOC that it was even allowed to come up for a vote for inclusion.
and it did shortly after he retired. And as I quote, one of the leaders in the sport, who said something like it, he always said it would be over his dead body that it would become an Olympic sport. And it was because it was shortly after his death that it, that it did become an Olympic sport. So, I think there was that the gender aspect of that for him.
Definitely. We see all the way going back to the. 1930s the comments he made about women in sports and how they shouldn’t be part of the Olympics
Jill: Another interesting aspect to me that the ioc seemed to have some say in was the name change from synchro to artistic swimming. So how did that come about?
Vicki Valosik: Well, that’s a really interesting story because unfortunately was able to get an interview with Thomas Bach head of the ioc You But from people who were there and or at the high level of this decisions being made, told me that he was watching a synchronized swimming competition with the head of FINA, , at the time was Cornell Markolescu and said to him, you know, there’s a lot more to this sport than synchronization.
I think it, why is it called that? Isn’t there a better name out there? And that sort of just planted this seed of. Oh, let’s rename the sport. And you know, at some point, according to Cornell, Mark Lesko, who did let me interview him, um, he started to get a lot of pressure from the IOC. The IOC just got a bug in its britches about changing the name and started put pressure on FINA, which then that pressure started being passed down to the synchronized swimming committee.
And Cornell told the committee, The technical committee. I want you to come up with a new name. They said, we don’t want a new name. This has been our name since 1934 of the Chicago World’s Fair was where it was coined and that went on for about a year, according to the people on the committee that I interviewed and then it didn’t go away.
He came back to them and said, look, I’m getting a lot of pressure from the IOC. They really want to rename the sport for whatever reason they thought rebranding it was sort of revitalize it, make it have more audience appeal. So they said. Okay, fine. We’ll come up with some options to vote on. And, one of those was artistic swimming.
And although they, they really didn’t want it and we’re planning to sort of convey that at the convention that it was voted on, but didn’t have an opportunity. It didn’t come up for a straw vote. 1st, it went and it didn’t come up for, um, discussion within the larger synchro community. It just went straight to the vote for all aquatic sports.
So you have, convention, randomly, let’s say you’re a water polo player. Suddenly, randomly, there’s this proposal from the synchronized swimming committee to change the name of the sport. You’re going to say, well, I guess that’s what they want. Fine. Who cares? I’ll vote for that. So it just passed very quickly without any sort of discussion without the people in the sport getting a chance to say, Hey, what do you think?
We actually don’t want this. We’re just sort of being pressured to put this out there for a vote. So it passed, came and people in the sport were completely blindsided. I mean, other than this small handful of people in the committee, most people in the sport didn’t see it coming. It was just announced, Hey, we’ve got a new name for our sport at the FINA level.
And, um, immediately, A petition was launched. Got like 11, 000 signatures. And people were just very unhappy all over the world. The signatories were writing comments like this takes us backwards. The artistry, the word artistic, takes away from the extreme athleticism.
And, you know, why would we change it now? Like it’s more athletic than ever. This makes us sound like Esther Williams or a water show. Just a lot of those kinds of comments. So athletes weren’t happy about it, but according to the woman who launched the petition, there was no response from FINA, no response to the IOC to this petition and it just, it just stayed.
And at the beginning, many of the federations around the world said, we’re not going to change our name, but eventually they start to kind of say, well, this is the name of our sport. And I guess we’ll change the name of our federation, which is what happened in the U S.
Alison: Has there been any follow up as to did the rebranding help or hurt?
Do we have any data on that?
Vicki Valosik: I don’t know of any data and I think it would be hard to say because there’s been so many other changes happening simultaneously. The acceptance of men, the addition of, brand new roles, the addition of the acrobatic routine, which I’m sure has really helped. I mean, that, that is such a stellar thing to watch people go flying 12 feet high.
So it’s, that’s happened at the same time. So you know, I’m sure that’s increased audience, Participation, as well as the cameras now that can film the above water and below water at the exact same time. So there’s just been a lot of other things that have probably like, you know, increased audience appeal.
So I think it would be hard to suss out whether any of that had to do with the name.
Alison: So you mentioned the new rules. This is the first quad with a lot of changes. Yes. so let’s, let’s just talk about what some of the changes were that we saw, but may not realize were different.
Vicki Valosik: Well, so now there is actually a, um, deduction based system.
So teams have to submit ahead of time. It’s sort of a list of their, it’s called a judge’s card. It’s a list of everything they’re going to do in the routine. And those, all of those things are worth objective amounts of points. And it gets extremely technical into like how high something’s going to be just depending on what the maneuver is, but it’s, all just quantifiable and not objective in terms of what the difficulty is.
And then from there, it’s Does the team actually do the execution of all of these difficult maneuvers properly? If so, they get the full points. If not, they get a base mark. So, teams can really sort of push themselves and try for higher difficulty, but that comes at greater risk, of course, because they might not, the harder it is, the higher the chance they might not execute things correctly and get a base mark.
So , that’s the biggest change. And that’s a big change towards greater objectivity. You know, which is always a quest for judge sports. How can we be less increasingly less subjective and more objective?
Alison: Did that feel successful to you watching the routines in Paris?
Vicki Valosik: Yes, I think that it was successful in the sense that the scoring is now much less objective.
And I think that’s a great thing for the sport because, prior to that, I heard a lot about teams feeling that they were locked in to their national rankings and international rankings didn’t really matter. How they change their routines. It was sort of like, well, Russia is expected to be best.
So they’re going to get the best score. The U S is falling behind and not expected to score well. So it doesn’t score well, regardless of how they were actually performing the day of whatever the competition was. So I think this really did a lot to resolve that. However, I think that I’ve also heard from those in this board that this is probably going, ironically, now that it’s called artistic swimming, going to cut down on the artistry, because whenever you have something based on difficulty and things being sort of like, okay, you do this for this many points, then things start to become more difficult.
Increasingly cookie cutter, which is exactly what happened in the 1950s, which was the first sort of whole revamping of the rules that I wrote about in my book. So there’s that complaint that how is this going to actually, you know, sort of cut down on the creativity because creativity comes second when you’re trying to achieve the maximum difficulty points you can.
Alison: It’s funny you say that because In the routine that I saw, all the teams did this one same move, where they would have one girl up in the air, and she’s balancing on one leg and holding the opposite foot behind her head.
Vicki Valosik: Uh huh.
Alison: And I assume that’s just because that’s an extremely high point.
Vicki Valosik: That’s correct. And we saw the same thing in a lot of the acrobatic routines in particular, like I’m not sure if this is the same one you’re referring to, but where there would be a platform lift, someone holding a leg behind their head and then holding on to a ballet leg of the person they were standing on.
Alison: And that was
Vicki Valosik: repeated. So exactly. You would start to see like, if these moves are worth the most points, we will be seeing those in every routine rather than just this amazing amount of diversity that we’re still seeing in free routines, thankfully. But that’s a big criticism of the new system. So I guess there’s never a perfect way to do it with stretch boards.
Alison: You mentioned the Russians and I loved in your book how I did not realize how anti synchronized swimming the Soviet Union was at the beginning and how interesting it is that they then became to dominate.
Vicki Valosik: Yes.
Alison: Talk a little bit about just where they came from and where they ended up. you
Vicki Valosik: Sure, so, synchronized swimming was really, so it was in the 50s 60s and early 70s.
It was really spreading internationally and it had started as an American sport. The first competition was in the U. S. for many years at the Americans and the Canadians sort of in second were the dumb was the completely dominant country. It was Americans were the one spreading it internationally. So, you know, for the earliest international competitions, they were winning everything.
So the Soviet Union, of course, didn’t want the United States to have an advantage in the Olympics in any way they could help it. So they did not want to see synchronized swimming become an Olympic sport, because in the early years, it wasn’t a developed sport in the Soviet Union in those years that it was trying to gain Olympic acceptance.
but at the same time, they had to. As I write rhythmic gymnastics, which had followed a similar trajectory, also a women’s sport that, what was the, it was the complete opposite. The United States didn’t have any sort of program for that. The Soviet Union knew it would dominate, so they were very keen on getting that one accepted.
So we had, these two women’s sort of judged performative ish. Sports coming from, these political adversaries, both wanting Olympic acceptance, and they actually got accepted together. The same voted in together, as you know, from the book, But that was interesting. So, uh, Don Bean, who is a leader in the sport for many years, she wrote I believe in her book or in, one of her many articles she wrote about the sport uh, coach from the Soviet Union came to a competition. They weren’t actually competing, she was just there to observe. And Don asked her, when are you guys going to send a team? And she responded, when we can beat you. So they were sort of, they didn’t even want to be part of it, and so They knew they could beat the United States.
So it was sort of like they entered late, but they were getting ready. They were training. They were bringing top coaches and athletes from all over the world to help them prepare and build their program. So that was sort of going on under the radar. And then once they, once they started, it didn’t take them long to catapult to the front because they’d been doing all this behind the scenes.
Alison: So, did you, in watching the sport, notice a difference now that Russia has been out of the mix because of all the bans for the last couple of years?
Vicki Valosik: Well, I mean, I think in terms of a difference in how the sport’s done, like, the sort of changes that Russia has made, brought about like the more gymnastic elements, the faster routines, those are still there and I think aren’t going to go away like that’s just the way the sport has evolved now.
But, definitely I saw sort of a different kind of, at least being in the U. S. A different kind of hopefulness of like, wow, maybe we’ll have a chance because it’s sort of like everyone just sort of assumes Russia is going to get the gold, which leaves only two medals. So I think it just sort of like, oh, this is a chance to see Things shake up and, you know, it gave, teams maybe more kind of energized teams to feel like they might have more of a chance.
And, so I think that was a change I saw, but not so much a change in actually the way the sport looks because that those changes have already become kind of incorporated all over the world.
Jill: Yeah, because it’s interesting that when Russia first got gold at Sydney 2000, and that was really the split of the U. S. fading as a powerhouse and Russia taking over, and you talked a little bit in the book about funding plays a big part in this, so what contributed to the U. S. ‘s Lack of presence in, in international competition in the final results. After 2000.
Vicki Valosik: yeah. So I see you had the 1996 dream team that got a perfect score and then they all retired. So you had for 2000, a completely new team at the Olympic level. So that was part of it. And synchronized swimming is a sport where the longer you’re in it, you really do become. better, like in the longer for sure that you train together as a team, you become better.
So it’s a sport where you benefit really from having seasoned athletes who have been to multiple Olympics. And the U. S. just doesn’t have that because as you mentioned, funding. So it’s, you know, the team is always just scraping together. They’re not, the athletes aren’t well funded. So, you know, they have to take out loans and have jobs.
And in Russia, you’re able to just sort of be a full time athlete for multiple Olympiads because there’s so much, funding for these athletes. So there’s that, which enables athletes to just sort of train longer, stay in the sport longer, train without the other, stresses that come with worrying about the financial support.
And then there’s the aspect of the, money for medals system we’ve got. So it’s like in the U S the more medals you’re, you win for your country in the sport, like the more funding you get, but synchronized swimming is already at a disadvantage because it only has two medal events, the team event and the duet.
So, you know, swimming, I don’t even know how many swimming has, but it’s way, way, way more than that. So, swimmers come back with multiple medals, synchronized swimming, even if they did tremendously well, might come back with one medal. so it’s already just a disadvantage. And, um, so if you sort of allot out how much a medal is worth in terms of funding, like they just, that doesn’t seem like, for the Olympic Funding Committee, like as much of an investment.
So there’s that. So, you know, and then you start to not medal at all. You fall behind, you get less funding and then it becomes sort of a cycle, right? You can’t, when you have less funding, you’re already not doing as great. Then it’s hard to invest in the athletes and give them the chance to compete in multiple Olympia.
It’s hard to train, invest in having the best coaches in the world. So for those reasons, it sort of just fell further and further behind, until recently.
Alison: What’s different now in the U. S. because they did manage to pull out a silver medal this time around and were, very impressive.
Vicki Valosik: Yes. Well, so Andrea Fuentes, the national team coach and former Spanish national champion, Olympic champion. she was brought in with the express goal by the U. S.
to get them back into the Olympics. And that was really their goal to qualify for it, not even to medals. I mean, they just exceeded their goals actually at this Olympics, their goal was to qualify and get back into the game. So she, you know, she has a very athlete, , centered approach of, I’ve heard her speak at some conventions and, you know, it’s all about Just having the athlete buy in.
So it’s not the sort of coaching where you rule by fear, but you rule by inspiration. And I think that just really worked with worked well with the American team. They brought in Victor Cha as the acrobatics coach, and he was tremendous. And that has just been an area where the US has really taken off and excelled.
And acrobatics, and that’s largely due to his coaching. So I think having this sort of specialty really helped them like, okay, we’re, we’ve got this great acrobatics specialty. And. You know, there’s Anita Alvarez, who has been in multiple Olympians as a, a duet swimmer. So there is a little bit of that seasoned athlete perspective, going in, but I think it just bringing in Andrea.
And then also there was a lot of, change at the leadership level at U. S. Artistic Swimming, just sort of breathe new life into the program. I think once you have athletes thinking, wow, there is a chance. That we could go to the Olympics, then you just get this different level of commitment. You get, you’re able to like retain top athletes.
I wrote an article during the 2016 Olympics about why the U S didn’t qualify. And at the time, there actually weren’t enough athletes to even send to the qualifiers because it was like there, you know, when you’re, you’re on a team that’s, Why would you commit, 14 hours a day of training, give up a college scholarship, give up whatever’s next in your life, if there’s just really no chance that your team’s going to qualify for the Olympics?
And that’s how far behind the US and Poland. So they just weren’t able to even retain athletes. And so, You know, if you can’t retain top athletes, how are you even going to have an Olympic team? So I think just this sort of idea, okay, we’re really, we’ve really got a goal. We’re making the investment to get back in the Olympics.
We’ve got this amazing coach who’s coming in, who’s going to shake things up that just energize athletes. It made them want to stick around. It made them willing to postpone other things in their life, give up opportunities. with the hope that, okay, this could really happen. We really could, I could be part of this, turnaround for the U. S. I think that was a huge part of it.
Alison: there was a part of your book that I really loved, and that was talking about after 1984, how all the sports journalists kind of jump in with this incredible sexism against the sport. And I’m curious to know what you’re seeing now in terms of sports journalism reporting On artistic swimming,
Vicki Valosik: it is.
Have we gotten any
Alison: better?
Vicki Valosik: So much better. I feel like now the only, the only time you see it made fun of is really from people who just really don’t know people who are outside of the world of sports, because how could you watch it for two minutes and not? realize how hard it is. I mean, there’s underwater cameras constantly reminding you that they’re not touching the bottom of the pool.
I even if you were touching the bottom of the pool and throwing athletes 12 feet into the air, like that’s still a difficult thing to do. So, it has gotten so much better. Yeah. I mean, in the, the times you mentioned, that’s when the famous Saturday Night Live spoof came out and, just a lot of, you know, I think at the very beginning, 1984, synchronized swimming just sort of, There it was.
It’s an Olympic sport. It sort of took people by surprise and it was sort of met with amusement of like, Oh, look, here’s this, you know, new glamor sport or whatever. But then it was after the Olympics as I write, you know, and sports journalists were saying, as Harry Shearer, who is in the famous Saturday Night Live skit said later, it really ticked him off to see, Women in glitter and lipstick standing on the metal podium with what he considered real athletes.
So that was very, a very common attitude. And, between 84 and the turn of the century. And then since then, I think as it’s gotten, well, actually part of the chains really came in nine six, I think with the, introduction of the team routine because they were just able to do things that were so much more evidently difficult, you know, that was the first time you have eight people that you the audience has started to see the lifts and Throwing people out of the air and even though it was not done anywhere near to the extent it is today that was you could see that that was difficult.
Whereas when you’re doing a duet you can’t do those incredibly visually exciting things that you can do with the whole team. So I think that was the beginning of a shift and then it’s just become so much more visibly difficult. The technology of the cameras showing that difficulty, but yeah, now you see articles there about the concussions there about the, you know, it’s just very different.
I haven’t seen articles in a long time that are sort of taking this sort of sexist view of the sport and sort of belittling it like you used to see very commonly.
Jill: Well, another thing I think back in the lineage of the sport, as you talked about in the book, were the competition slash shows where we really got into themes.
And that was one of my favorite bits in the book where the theme element came in and that’s where I saw the lineage of, Oh, we have the story around all the routines and things like that today. not how did that come about, but. I don’t know how they swam in some of these costumes. That’s what got me.
The tremendous costumes that went into this.
Vicki Valosik: Definitely. Yeah, I mean, the one that comes to mind is one of the women I quote, who they were dressed as clowns in a routine and had like, you know, swimming caps and covered them and wool wigs, a yarn wool hair and said that it just felt like they had like 30 pounds on their head when they came out of water.
So, yes, definitely getting rid of The theatrical costumes, largely doing away with themes, really helped, to, that was part of those years in which the sport was really trying to sever the impression that it was still a part of this sort of world of show business. So it had definitely come out of that. One thing we haven’t talked about was the water pageants of the 1920s and 30s and that’s really where this theatrical aspect came from, like, those actually had scripts and plots and they were used to, draw the public into swimming and water safety and as a teaching tool, but then it became a form of entertainment and those sort of things lingered the themes and the props long after the dialogue was gone.
So, though, that was the early years of the sport, even once it was a competitive sport, as you mentioned, these things were going on. So, you know, that started is really this 1970s was the decade where they were. really shifting. A lot of things changed. The sport became more difficult. They started using the egg beater kick, the support skull to support themselves upside down.
So it was really shifting from a, you know, a horizontal sport with a lot of floating on the surface to a vertical sport, you know, you’re right side up or upside down with these different, technical swimming changes. So I think that was too a part of being taken seriously. But for many years people sort of still associated even after those things were gone, that was in recent memory, right?
Esther Williams was still in recent memory of sports writers in 1984 and 88. Whereas now, I mean that she doesn’t come to mind for a lot of people and a lot of, young people don’t know who she is even. So it’s, she’s not the go to sort of, pop culture association like she used to be.
Alison: We do still love the themes though that these teams come up with. Yes, they’re so fantastic and so complicated Often,
Vicki Valosik: uh huh, like the water theme the source. I mean the US had the water theme the sorcerer’s thing it is hard to sort of have you know three or four minute routine select your music without starting to think of theme in some way You feel like you need a way to unify it all so it’s almost hard to not You know, my team does it.
It’s just like, it’s sort of natural. Like, how are you going to like bring all this together? Not just have, you know, these random clips of music that you’re swimming to
Alison: where do you see the sport going in the next quad and moving forward?
Vicki Valosik: I think the big change we’re going to see, hopefully, is more men in the pipeline. I think the changes we saw in this Olympics are, you know, You know, this was a big Olympiad for change for the sport.
I mean, with the addition of acrobatic routine, the new rules. So I think that we’re going to be seeing just more of that. Probably the acrobatic routine is beginning to become even more spectacular. People are going to probably start to associate the sport as water gymnastics increasingly because of this new kind of routine.
so that’s the, that’s the way I sort of see it going just in these, these were sort of the baby steps, this Olympiad of what we’re going to see developing more and more in the future. And hopefully men being a part of that with the Olympic acceptance of them in 2022.
Jill: I want to get in a little bit to the process of writing the book. What was the, Genesis of the idea and then what kind of rabbit holes to do discover when you started digging in because it just I was reading it, it’s just like oh my gosh This is a is amazing rabbit hole that you must have had fun going down and there were a lot of it and bringing it all Together bringing it all together took a lot of time Thought and care really and and it’s a very complicated history of a sport.
Vicki Valosik: Well, thank you Going down rabbit holes was definitely the best part of working on this book for sure. I really enjoyed that let’s see. Where did they get? So the initial idea? It came, you know I started synchronous swimming in my early 30s as a beginner on a master’s team and I was getting a writing degree at the time and just sort of Naturally, I guess began became curious about the history of the sport started reading about it.
And, you know, was surprised to see it doesn’t just start with Esther Williams. It’s there’s then there’s Annette Kellerman and pretty soon. Oh, well, actually, she wasn’t even the beginning. It goes to the 1800s. And then, then I sort of became almost obsessed with, well, where did it start? What’s the earliest form of it and learned about, you know, these guys are the 1500s.
Yeah, I guess I just, the more I dug, the more threads I kept finding. And I just loved just following those threads because for the first few years of research, I was just casting a very wide net. You know, I knew there was a book, I knew there was a story, but I wasn’t sure what it was yet.
And the research was just so much fun to me. And I felt like I couldn’t write about something until I felt I had kind of, become an expert in that little subtopic like diving girls or whatever. Like, so I had to just learn a lot about all of these things. I think some of my favorite rabbit holes had to do with just weird connections.
I wouldn’t have expected like the connections to suffrage and swimming performance and how life saving was actually really just a given skill for swimmers. How like , these things were so interconnected in the early years, like all swimmers knew how to dive, all swimmers knew life saving skills.
It was like, you sort of had this package of aquatic skills that now are just considered very distinct, I’ve never taken a life saving class, even though I’m a strong swimmer, I wouldn’t know how to save another person, the water, which is really unfortunate. Cause that used to be, a key thing of knowing how to swim.
So just seeing some of those interesting connections. So realizing, wow, this isn’t just a story about this sort of performative sport, but it has overlaps to all these other things. Like The world of carnivals and the world of life saving and even to ancient Rome. And, so I think those rabbit holes just were so much fun that it was almost, I think maybe to my detriment, you know, sometimes then I would get overwhelmed by the amount of stuff I had found.
And like you said, it did take a tremendous amount of thought to think about, okay, how does this now all get corralled into a cohesive story.
Alison: you have some favorite things that you had to leave out that you’re still heartbroken that you just could not work this story into this book?
Vicki Valosik: Some of the things that got left out were sort of, um, A lot of original wording that people said, because I just loved finding that, like, thinking, Oh, there’s this interesting connection. And then I would actually find someone saying that from the 1910s in a newspaper quote, and I would just be desperate to include that.
And my editor would say, okay, you know, quotes lose their power. If you have too many of them, or we believe you, you’re an expert. You don’t have to prove it with all of these primary sources. But I think the 1 thing that almost got cut, but I just. I got it was so important to me that it get in even if it was to the detriment of a couple of like chapter structures was the warfare aquatics of the second world war that didn’t naturally fit anywhere and it almost got cut but I just felt like if this is going to be The book on the history of the sport.
Like this really needs to be in there. It’s just too fascinating. You know, that was of course about the techniques that synchronized swimmers of the mid century were using. Those are being taught to young men going off to fight in the second world war because it was an amphibious war and they were going to face all kinds of unusual scenarios in the water.
And these same skill sets could help them not only be more comfortable and confident in the water, but do things like, how do you lift one of your. fellow soldiers above the surface of the water so that they can see if there’s a rescue ship or an enemy on the horizon or how to boost yourself or how to sink quickly and quietly.
So that was just so fascinating and I wish actually that I could have put a lot more because there’s really interesting connections to warfare aquatics in Japan and samurai swimming and I just had to gloss over it a little bit. I would have loved to include more but I did at least get it in there because I felt like It’s too interesting to not go in there.
Alison: You had a lot of great photographs of some of those early costumes. Were you able to see any video reel or newsreel of some of those kind of pre 1970 routines?
Vicki Valosik: Yes, some. There are some, not widely available. But yes, I was able to see some there. A lot of several of the national teams made coaching videos.
Or, , were sort of showcased in newsreels and, well not, I guess they weren’t called newsreels by the 70s, but short news clips, I was able to see some of those, unfortunately, I mean, I would love to have seen videos of some of the, earliest things before there were videos, but, you know, there’s a video of the Billy Rose’s Aquacade, which was really neat to watch.
but yes, and mostly because of the teaching videos that were done of these routines.
Alison: See, I wouldn’t have gotten past the videos.
Jill: I know, I did have to stop and put on one of the, waterfall one with Esther Williams. That was amazing to watch. and speaking of that era with the Aqua shows, the other thought that I had while reading this was how did not more of these high divers die?
Oh, how many, how many dives they were doing. And I. I couldn’t get a feel for how big the pools were necessarily because they seemed enormous, but I didn’t understand how deep they were. And I just feared for their lives all the time. Yes.
Vicki Valosik: Yeah. So in the 1910s and 1920s, I think that was like the era of the biggest danger because that’s when, the carnivals, We’re doing these diving girl shows and vaudeville and there just were absolutely no performer or athlete protections.
I mean, if like, if you were willing to do this a hundred foot high dive into a tiny shallow tank. I mean, it wasn’t like anybody was going to stop anybody from offering the money or any performers from doing it. And, you know, that was really good money to these young women and who didn’t have a lot of, a lot of ways to make a living in 1910s.
So, yeah, it’s amazing. as I write in the, diving girls chapter, There was one performer who was blinded, but that was only after doing this about 300 times, and probably slowly her retinas were getting, damaged over time, and then finally just ripped. and then I only found evidence of, I mean only but of a couple of diving girls dying during performances, which is pretty remarkable given that there were thousands of them circulating the country in these carnival shows and worlds fit in, states fairs, local fairs, vaudeville acts, but the the kind of high dives they were doing aren’t even done anymore.
So Lucille Anderson, who was one of the most famous diving girls and she continued really into almost into the mid century with her act when she was in her 60s and she was doing a kind of high dive where you just you know you dive off you’re going down head first and you land face first and that eventually changed now when you see these tremendous high dives someone will dive off they’ll do a few flips and they’ll land feet first so i now we know this is very dangerous landing face first, You can snap your neck as well as get blinded.
But, but she was doing that long after others had kind of stopped doing it.
Jill: Well, and then you’ve got the tidbit about Esther Williams having the diving accident as well, which really hit home how dangerous, I mean, we have more proof of how dangerous it was.
Vicki Valosik: Yeah, and in her case, that was, as I wrote and learned in her memoir, from the crown she was wearing on her head, which was It’s lightweight by standards of crowns, but you know, not lightweight in terms of making your head have a clean break in the water when it, you know, a clean, slicing into the water and it knocked her head back and because she realized it as she wrote in her memoir, but it was too late.
She thought of it as she was diving and, flying through the air like, Oh my God, what’s going to happen with this crown? And she wrote in her book many times about nobody was looking out for her safety if she so she actually blamed herself like, Oh, I should have thought of that before. I was, pummeling to the surface of the water, but nobody else did.
You know, she didn’t think of it. Nobody was looking out for her with her heavy costumes or. painting the inside of her tank black so that her white negligee would show up and then not thinking, Oh, she’s not going to be able to find her way out. She almost died in that scene. So she had so many scenes where she sort of learned over and over.
No one’s looking out for me here. there are no protections if I don’t think of it and look out for myself.
Jill: Speaking of safety, and that’s a nice way to bring it back to today. In reading how Russia, China, other countries are having their athletes practice 12 to 14 hour days. How safe is that for athletes today?
Vicki Valosik: That’s a great question. I’m not sure about the length of training and how safe that is, but it’s more, I think the safety issues are how the routines are done. Now they’re done so close together. Like actually, Having my epilogue, a quote from the coach of the Ohio team saying how when she was a young woman competing, there was about three feet of space between each swimmer in a routine.
And now it’s more like 12 inches at one foot. So there, you know, and then they’re kicking incredibly hard. Sometimes they’re kicking while their teammates are upside down. So their heads right next to their feet, not to mention throwing, you know, their teammates. 12 feet up into the air and then they come crashing down somewhere on this pile of people that are, in very close proximity.
So there’s very, very little margin for error in terms of, traumatic head injury, you know, which happens a lot. So I think that’s the biggest issue, biggest safety issue in the sport now. Hypoxic blackout is an issue, staying underwater too long, but that is, It’s a little bit frowned upon to stay underwater as long as they used to in 1984.
Candy coasting, Tracy Ruiz, the first American Olympians, they were underwater for the whole first minute of their routine. And you don’t see that done anymore, but it’s still very risky because you are just getting, you know, doing a cardiac exercise, getting more and more you know, winded and then going upside down.
So even though they’re, they seem like short stretches when you’re watching from the comfort of your couch, it’s really difficult to do these maneuvers when you’re already like oxygen deprived. So I think those are the biggest safety issues now probably more so than the length of time spent training.
Alison: Yeah. And we saw, who is it? Anita Alvarez who passed out in the pool at one of the events.
Vicki Valosik: Yes. Yeah. And that could have, I mean, it was her coach who saved her, not the lifeguard. So it’s. Someone can drown really, really fast, even an expert.
Jill: How is leadership of the sport talking about these issues today
Vicki Valosik: from you know, I haven’t done any interviews about that per se But just in being an athlete and getting the emails that you know, all the athletes in the sport get there’s a lot more About safe sport training a lot of training coaches have to go through today. There’s even some The technology changes to try to improve things.
One is, there’s these caps called hammerhead caps. They’re swim caps that have a honeycomb padding in the top of them. they don’t usually wear them at, competitions cause they’re gelling their hair. But a lot of the top teams, teams that are doing these really dangerous maneuvers, wear them during practices as they’re figuring out, okay, we’re going to throw someone.
in the air, where are they going to land? You know, it’s a big, it’s, they’ve kind of got those kinks worked out by the time you see them in the Olympics, but you know, in the practice is where it’s really dangerous because you’re figuring things out. So a lot of them are wearing these honeycomb hammerhead hats now, caps.
so that’s one thing, but I’d say, yeah, just definitely a lot of coaches training and it’s through these coaches training again, that like things like hypoxic blackout, they’re a lot more aware of that.
Alison: As a swimmer yourself, what’s your favorite move to do and to see?
Vicki Valosik: So my favorite move, I can’t really tell you why, is called the split rocket. And that’s where you, you get in a little tuck, upside down, and then you just like, shoot your legs up, do a splits, bring them back together, and then sink again.
and then there’s also a split rocket boost, where someone is under you, a teammate, and they just push you while you do it, so you just get even that much higher. That’s my favorite to do. I think my favorite to watch was just the tremendous acrobatics that we’re seeing now. I mean, that’s, that’s hard to not be just like wowed by seeing someone go catapulting through the air and just knowing to stop to remember.
Wow, there’s the ones pushing them are just kicking hard enough. to create friction against the water to get enough resistance like that’s how hard they’re kicking and how fast to get friction against the water to propel their teammates out of the water. So, those are my favorite and also now the cameras that are directly above the patterns that show the interesting changes and patterns.
I really like watching those as well, when it comes to watching it on TV.
Jill: Anything that we missed that’s important to know,
Vicki Valosik: The importance of male allies. Like just like as detrimental as Avery Brundage was, I mean, I just, I just fell in love with Commodore Longfellow. I mean, he was just such a feminist when that wasn’t even I don’t think, you know, I mean, when the American Red Cross wouldn’t accept women, he was like, fine, I’ll just go create a sister organization, the national, the women’s alliance, whatever you call it, and use all the same curriculum, use all the same testing and just make my own, cohorts of female lifeguards.
And then when the Red Cross gets his act together, they’ll be ready to go. So, I mean, that is amazing, you know, and I found, Newspaper clippings where he was like saying, I specifically young men of color are invited. This is for you. So I mean, he was like really doing a lot to like, incorporate black Children and women into what he was doing when that wasn’t a thing that a lot of people of his era cared about.
So I just really, want to give him props to
Jill: Excellent. Well, Vicki, thank you so much for joining us. It’s a really interesting book and, uh, just what you would not think synchronized swimming or artistic swimming would have as its history. So it’s really eye opening and a fun read.
Vicki Valosik: Thank you so much.
Thanks for having me on your show. I really enjoyed talking with you both.
Jill Jaracz: Thank you, Vicki. You can learn more about Vicki at her website and follow her on X, Insta, and Facebook. We will have links to all of that in the show notes.
We’ll be at Olympin 2024!
Jill Jaracz: We’ll also have a link to Olympin.
Alison Brown: Because we’ll be there!
Jill Jaracz: That’s right the uh Olympin group, which is a pin collectors club. We have been at the show before we will be at the show again. We’ve had many Olympin members on the show in previous episodes, so we are excited to go hang out with our friends there.
It is a free memorabilia show where you can buy and trade pins and other cool Olympic and Paralympic souvenirs and ephemera. It will be held Friday through Sunday, November 8th through 10th at the Marriott Atlanta Buckhead Hotel and Conference Center. in Atlanta, Georgia. Friday and Saturday the show is 10 to 5.
Sunday it is 10 to 3. We will have a table there, so please stop on by and say hello. And it’s free. Did I say that?
Alison Brown: You did say that, but it’s always good to know that it’s free.
Jill Jaracz: Yes, so please come by if you are in the Atlanta area.
Paris 2024 News
Alison Brown: Le musée est
Jill Jaracz: vert. Oui! So, Zeus the horse, from the opening ceremonies that traveled all the way down the river, and then set up shop at the Hotel de Ville for the duration of the game so we couldn’t get in, uh, Now Zeus the horse is back on display. He is at Versailles at an exhibit there Until November 24th, so you can see Zeus the horse at the Royal Courtyard in the Chateau de Versailles
Alison Brown: Another statue you can go see
Jill Jaracz: if you are in Melbourne, and I know I got this story from the New York Post so let’s qualify that you know, we’re dealing with a tabloid there, but someone has made a statue of Ray Gunn, the Australian breakdancer, and it’s in a tree lawn in Melbourne.
Alison Brown: So I have seen people, post pictures of Halloween decorations where they have like a skeleton dressed as Raygun, or they’ll have a pumpkin head dressed as Raygun, but that’s just on people’s lawns. This is in a public space.
Jill Jaracz: Right. Because it’s on the tree lawn part of the yard. So,
Alison Brown: and nobody knows who put it there.
It’s very accurate. It’s a nice little papier mâché statue of Raygun. So her 15 minutes is not up yet.
Jill Jaracz: Not at all. If you see it, let us know.
Milan-Cortina 2026 News
Jill Jaracz: Donna
Alison Brown: Mangia Una Mela.
Jill Jaracz: You’re doing about one or two days of duolingo as well, huh? So we have less than 500 days to go until the Paralympics. Seems like a long time, doesn’t seem like a long time at all.
Alison Brown: Yeah. No, it actually does. If, you know what, when it gets to be winter, it’ll feel very close.
Jill Jaracz: True, true, the other good news, I think, is that Post Italiana has signed on as a premium partner of the games. Note to Post Italiana, or their representatives, or anybody who might be listening who has an in there, please make a special postmark.
People really like those
Alison Brown: special postmarks. And don’t worry about the smelly stamps because they did not smell.
Jill Jaracz: No, they did not. And that was, that was kind of a bummer. But special postmark is always nice if you’re at the village or the press center because there’s a post office there. We appreciate it.
Also announced are the opening and closing ceremonies producers as well as the producer for the torch relay. So every time I read about how complicated Milan Cortina is going to be all spread out part of me dies inside
Alison Brown: Part of you just envisions your life on a train for two weeks.
Yeah, and a train strike because it’s Italy
Jill Jaracz: Right. Well, I think worse I envision myself more on a bus on a narrow little tiny Alpine Road, hoping that I get someplace else or get to where I’m going on time or
Alison Brown: just survive the bus ride and don’t fall off the mountain. Hey, we survived the mountains of Beijing.
Jill Jaracz: We did. And I don’t mind. I mean, if somebody else is driving, they are, they are pros. They know how to do that stuff. But I just, I really feel like we are going to spend a ton of time transporting ourselves from place to place. But we have four ceremonies that are in three locations. The Olympic Opening Ceremony is in San Siro Stadium in Milan.
That will be produced by Ballet’s Wonder Studio. They played a part in doing The flag handover to Milan at Beijing, which was an interesting production. These poor, I do remember this poor, modern dance duet. Weren’t they barefoot? They were, they looked so cold. It was really, really cold. And these poor people were not wearing much in the way of clothes and they had a fairly substantial dance number.
So, I mean, it was very cool, but. It did not look like it was fun to do. they also did the candidacy videos for Milan Cortina’s bid. They did Rio 2016, a lot of the elements there for the Olympics for ceremonies and the Tokyo flag handover. And they also did, Olympic closing ceremonies and Paralympic opening and closing ceremonies from Sochi 2014.
So they will be doing the opening for the Olympics, the closing for the Olympics, and the opening for the Paralympics is going to be at the Arena di Verona in Verona. That will be headed up by Film Master. they did stuff for Rio 2016, like the torch relay, and they’ve Did some of the opening and closing ceremonies for the Olympics, as well as the Paralympics.
did the opening ceremonies for Torino 0 0 6, the flag handover for London 2012, and the flag handover for Torino 2006. So they’ve been in this game a long time as well. Then we’ve got the Paralympic closing ceremony, which will be at the ice stadium of Corina dso, which was the. 1956 Olympic Stadium as well that will be produced by G2 Eventi, Costa Diva Group, and, they don’t seem to have as much of a, tradition of opening and closing ceremony.
So, this will be a nice foray to see what they do and the torch relays will be produced by Alpha Omega in partnership with RNK and, We’ll see what they produce as well. So
Alison Brown: we keep talking about the regional, so just to give people a sense, if you’re driving from San Siro to Verona, that’s two and a half hours.
Jill Jaracz: Yes.
Alison Brown: If you’re driving from San Siro to Cortina, that’s four and a half hours.
Jill Jaracz: Yes.
Alison Brown: And if you’re driving from Verona to Cortina, that’s still about four hours because it’s a triangle.
Jill Jaracz: Yes.
Alison Brown: So yeah, we’re not talking about. Half an hour outside of town. this is true regional, very spread out. I mean, the Winter Olympics always has two sites.
You’ve always got a mountain and a city for past several ones. but this is really, I mean, we thought Beijing was tough.
Jill Jaracz: But, but I think, I mean, if you looked at it on paper, Yangtze was not that far away. Right. And it was, and the high speed train
Alison Brown: was very, we just had trouble because they, because they weren’t running things the way they should have because of COVID.
Jill Jaracz: Right. But
Alison Brown: at least they had the trains in place. There’s no trains here.
Jill Jaracz: Well, there are trains. They just aren’t the high speed rail. There are,
Alison Brown: there are not trains between these three locations. Like all, like you cannot get from Dampeso. On a train, boy, boy, maybe if there’s like 3 or 4 or 5 different trains, but like, when I look at, they say there’s no public transportation option.
Jill Jaracz: Oh, geez.
Alison Brown: Yeah.
Jill Jaracz: Well, that’ll be interesting. But it’s interesting. Also that Verona is only really hosting. A couple of ceremonies, there’s not much going on there. There’s stuff going around for the Paralympics. It is mostly in Cortina. Yes. And the immediate surrounding areas, that doesn’t look like that will be too hard to get around, except for if you wanted to see sled hockey, that’s back in Milan.
And then for the Olympics, stuff is just really spread out, depending on where you are. And we still don’t really know where sliding will be.
Alison Brown: I’m trying to think of a good Verona, Romeo and Juliet joke. I can’t think of one. I’ll work on that between now and closing ceremonies.
LA 2028 News
Jill Jaracz: You may have seen this news in the Facebook group. Thank you to listener Patrick from Chicagoland for tipping us off on this. A Sportico article says that cricket. Maybe on the East Coast per L. A. 2028 head, Casey Wasserman. So, they’re doing this for time zone reasons, really, because, the three hour time difference makes It makes it, I believe, nine hour time difference from New York versus a 12 hour time difference to
Alison Brown: India.
Jill Jaracz: Yes. To India. The big market for cricket.
Alison Brown: And also there aren’t cricket pitches in LA and there are a couple in other places that would be East Coast time.
Jill Jaracz: Somehow I don’t think it’s that. Gonna be too hard to put in some stands and set up a cricket area I mean, I don’t know when they were first talking about cricket being added to the games There was a field a area where I believe they there is some cricket action going on there Thought that they put it there. And this is not official yet. Correct? Correct. Correct. So he is speculating and putting stuff out there. I don’t know if it’s feelers to see if people on the East Coast are interested or what kind of reaction this will be.
You know, you could have cricket matches early in the morning in L. A. and have them be on primetime in India. I don’t think that would be too much of a hardship. I don’t know. But then you can’t
Alison Brown: really sell, I mean, it’s very hard to sell a ticket for a 7 a. m. event.
Jill Jaracz: If it’s cool. Or if people are rabid cricket fans, they will go, no matter what.
I Just saying. people will show up for that. what I don’t love about this is now we are suddenly making. The L. A. Games more and more regional and I understand using facilities in Oklahoma City, which will also already be a different time zone, but they’re expensive. They’re pretty expensive facilities to build and so using stuff that’s existent.
You’re going to have a great softball stadium and putting 2 sports in 1 city helps give. More of an Olympic feel, I would think.
Alison Brown: And I wonder if they’ll throw some soccer matches in Oklahoma City just to even, because you know, there’s, you need to spread out soccer just because there’s so many games and so much of it that always gets spread out.
Jill Jaracz: Yes. we know that will happen. You would think that that’d be able to happen around California for sure. Maybe a little over, but yeah, it would be nice to have that. But once you start getting into a four hour time difference, I mean, we saw this with the Surfing and, Every sport that wasn’t in the France immediate area was kind of an afterthought, I think, and the only reason we paid attention to surfing at all was because it was on TV when we were recording at night.
Alison Brown: Because we apparently were functioning in the Tahiti time zone. We’ll see. Let’s, let’s put a pin in it and say, let’s see when the official
Jill Jaracz: program comes out.
Alison Brown: Yeah.
Jill Jaracz: We will still see. Okay.
Legacy News
Jill Jaracz: Uh, we do have some legacy news according to gripped. com. There’s a new sports park in Tokyo called the live door urban sports park located in Ariake and it’s using some Tokyo 2020 equipment.
So the international federation of sport climbing donated all of the holds, volumes, and pads that were used at the 2020 Olympics for the sport climbing competitions. So you can go there now and climb like an Olympian.
TKFLASTAN Update
Alison Brown: Welcome to ShookFest On.
Jill Jaracz: Now is the time where we check in with our team at Keep the Flame Alive. These are past guests and listeners of the show who make up our citizenship of our very own country, Shuklastan. First up,
Alison Brown: Grace Norman won two gold medals at the World Triathlon Championships in the Para Women’s PTS5 class and the Para Mixed Relay.
Jill Jaracz: She is having a good year.
Alison Brown: Collecting the hardware.
Jill Jaracz: October 12th was Kenny Bednarek Day in Rice Lake, Wisconsin, which included a parade in his honor.
Alison Brown: Sled hockey player Monica Quimby has been named to Team USA’s roster for the Women’s World Challenge, taking place this weekend in Norway.
Jill Jaracz: Also, this weekend, Paraswimmer Olivia Chambers will be the Grand Marshal for the University of Northern Iowa’s Homecoming Parade.
Alison Brown: And Evan Dunfee is racing in the 35 kilometer racewalk in the Japanese Racewalking Championships this weekend.
Get in Touch!
Jill Jaracz: And that will do it for this episode. Let us know what you think about synchronized or artistic swimming.
Alison Brown: We love hearing from you. You can chat with us and other listeners on our Facebook group, keep the flame alive podcast, email us at flamealivepod at gmail. com. And the voicemail and text line is always open at two zero eight.
3, 5, 2, 6, 3, 4, 8. That’s 208. Flame it.
Jill Jaracz: Next week, we will be back with more stories and news from the Olympics and Paralympics. We have some more check ins post Paris coming up for you that were really a lot of fun, and we are excited to bring those to you. Thank you so much for listening, and until next time, keep the flame alive.