At the Piscine Olympique Angelotti, the world’s best Artistic Swimming athletes will be competing for top honours in the eleven events contested from this  Friday through Sunday (5-7 May).  While Paris has been a regular stop in the Artistic Swimming series, for Montpellier, situated near the beautiful Mediterranean coast, this is the first time they are hosting a World Aquatics event.

Almost all the medal winners from Markham, several World Champions, a few Junior and Youth World Champions, as well as many other elite athletes, have arrived in Montpellier and are getting ready to compete.

The number of entries is remarkably high, another indication that everyone wants the experience to compete and be judged under the new system prior to the World Aquatics Championships in Fukuoka this July. For the past 6 years, the World Aquatics Innovation Committee has been working on developing a new scoring system with the objective to change the sport of Artistic Swimming to make the competitions exciting and unpredictable, while making it fairer for the athletes, more in alignment with other judged sports, and introducing the elements of risk and strategy that will be able to change the outcomes.

“I feel that our sport is headed in the right direction - that it is more exciting, more unpredictable, and that athletes were in control of their declared difficulty - of their risk and reward,” said Kara Heald (CAN) Rules Support Team member.

No longer will results be predictable, and no longer will a human factor be judging the difficulty of a routine. Now that the new system is implemented in competition, the Innovation Team is not done, their name has changed to the AQUA Rules Support Team, and they are continuously working to improve this new system to make it better and to educate athletes, coaches, and technical officials.

"One of the biggest complaints from Coaches was that they would make their routines more difficult over time, but from competition to competition the difficulty score changed and even became lower, even when it was the same routine," said Anastasiya Petrenko (UKR) Rules Support Team member. "Now we have set values, there is no more human factor. We can now compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges. Everyone is in the same boat.”

“Although there may be further education to implement, it’s fairer for all competitors.  The athletes and coaches tried to include as much difficulty as possible as that was definitely the priority within the routines at this competition," said American artistic swimming legend Bill May and Technical Controller. "It’s much more objective but also comes with more consequences if the declared difficulty was not met.”

The Women Solo events this weekend will feature the medalists from Markham: Ukraine’s Marta Fiedina Japan’s Yukiko Inui, and Canada’s Audrey Lamothe.

Joining them is France’s Laelys Alavez, 2022 World Youth silver medalist, and Austria’s Vasiliki Alexandri, who finished in 5^th place at the 2022 Budapest World Championships. 

Fiedina was cagey when talking about changes in training and preparation since Markham: “For now, this remains a secret, since, now, one of the main factors of our sport is the effect of surprise, therefore, our programs and preparation for competitions remain a secret.”

Besides the changes in the scoring system, the other notable change in the sport has been the addition of up to two males in the Team routines, which has led to more male athletes competing at the world level. This weekend the Male Solo events and the Mixed Duet events have more than ten entries each.  Last year’s Super Final gold medalist, Spain’s Fernando Diaz del Rio Soto, the silver medalist, USA’s Kenneth Gaudet, and bronze medalist Kazakhstan’s Eduard Kim are all ready to show their routines in France this weekend in the Male Solo events.

The Mixed Duet events will be a showdown between the silver and bronze World Championship medalists, Japanese brother and sister Yotaro and Tomoka Sato and the Chinese duo Yiyao Zhang and Haoyu Shi, winner of the gold medal at the first 2023 ASWC. With the addition of Kazakhstan’s Nargiza Bolatova and Eduard Kim and Spain’s Fernando Diaz del Rio Soto and Emma Garcia the Mixed Duets events will be very exciting to watch. The most anticipated events this weekend may be the Women's duet events.

With the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris just around the corner, many countries are focusing on the available qualification spots. The Olympic Games feature only the Duet and Team event, and as such, for most artistic swimming countries, it is pretty much impossible to assemble enough athletes to participate in the team’s event. There will be twenty-seven duets competing for the three spots on the podium. 

The historical win in the Free Duet event in Markham by the Israeli duet Shelly Bobritsky and Ariel Nassee brought the crowd to their feet. Since then, the reality of winning the gold medal has settled in for the pair from Israel. Bobritsky shared that they did not expect to win, their goal heading into Markham was to get on the podium. The pair knew that their routine had a high degree of difficulty and that it would come down to executing the hybrids correctly.

“The gold medal opened our appetite, and we really want to improve even more," Bobritsky said. "We know there are a lot of expectations now from us, so we work really hard to stay at the high level we set in Canada and even go higher and better.”

The Israeli duo will have to bring their A-game, as the field is filled with the best of the best duets. The gold, silver, and bronze medalists from the World Aquatics Championships - Budapest 2022, China’s Liuyi Wang and Qianyi Wang, Ukrainians Maryna and Vladyslava Aleksiiva, and Austria’s Anna-Maria Alexandri and Eirini Alexandri, respectively. Also present in this elite field are the bronze medalists from Markham Japanese Moe Higa, and Mashiro Yasunaga. The debuting Italian duet of Linda Cerruti and Lucrezia Ruggiero, who won the gold in the Duet Free in Markham, is not present in Montpellier.

The Team events are set to be spectacular, featuring China, Ukraine, France, Canada, Japan, Italy, Spain, the United States and Israel to name a few. This stop will be another opportunity for Coaches and athletes to perform their routines and to see how the other competitors have made changes to their routines.

The program for the weekend for which the results are on the World Aquatics website, and which can be viewed live on World Aquatics YouTube. Here's what's coming up: 

Friday, May 6^th

•  9:00 CET Solo Free Women and Solo Free Men
• 16:00 CET Duet Technical Women and Duet Technical Mixed

Saturday, May 6th

•  9:00 CET Solo Technical Women and Solo Technical Men
• 15:00 CET Duet Free Women
• 19:30 CET Team Technical

Sunday, May 7^th

• 10:30 CET Team Free
• 14:30 CET Mixed Free Duet
• 17:15 CET Acrobatic Routine and Gala