2022 Artistic Swimming Athlete of the Year: Yukiko Inui

The thirty-three-year-old Inui has been competing internationally since 2008 but won her first World Championship medal at the 2015 Kazan World Championships. In Kazan, Inui won medals in the Duet and Team events, but it was not until the 2019 Gwangju World Championships when Inui started her establishment as a Soloist, that she won a bronze medal in both the free and technical events.

In Budapest at the 2022 World Championships Inui won her first World Championship gold medals in the Technical and Free Solo events. In Fukuoka, her eighth Word Championship participation, Inui successfully defended her titles with two flawless performances. Inui expressed her excitement about receiving the honour in front of her home crowd, “The postponement due to the pandemic has been challenging but I have been preparing very well and, in the end, I had a great performance, and I am very happy about the championship here in Fukuoka and my results.”

“The goal for Fukuoka has been to get Japan on the podium in every event” shared Inui about being at home, “We are the host, and the home crowd was really cheering hard and helping us to do even better to represent our country earlier shared her goal for herself and the Japanese team in Fukuoka."

Inui elaborated on Japan having their best results at a World Championship to date by winning seven medals, four gold, 1 silver, and 2 bronze and the team award “I have been very motivated over the past year, I am proud that I was nominated, proud of the team, because we are representatives of Japan.”

Inui’s trademark has been the delivery of her extraordinary ability to express herself artistically in the water, to mesmerize the audience during her performances.  Inui’s hobby away from the pool, performing arts and stage and screen, probably influences her scores for artistic impression which are always amongst the highest in the field.  Inui explained that her expressive swims and interpretation of the themes of the choreographies using her entire body is an important part of her training, “We work endlessly with the choreographer and the coach to work on the details needed to express the theme while swimming.”

Having adapted quickly to the new scoring system requiring athletes to execute the declared difficulties, Inui’s swims have been flawless, receiving the full difficulty scores each performance. What is her secret? “Checking every single swim from multiple angles with slow motion cameras to analyze and perfect every tiny move in every performance that I do.” Although it took some getting used to the new scoring system, Inui admitted candidly “I would like to see the best athletes win, the best performances with the best artistic impression should be on the podium.”

Besides the 2024 World Championships in Doha, next year, the 2024 Paris Olympic Games are the major international competition on the calendar. Solo events, unfortunately for the Solo expert Inui, are not part of the Olympic Games program, and Inui, who won a bronze medal in the Duet event at the 2016 Rio Olympic Games, indicated “My focus has been Fukuoka, now that this is done, I will start thinking about Paris.”