On Wednesday night, Aleksandr Maltsev picked up his third gold medal in Singapore when he and Mayya Gurbanberdieva won the Mixed Duet Technical event – six years after winning their first world title together. Spain took silver. Italy claimed the bronze.
SINGAPORE – On a night when several teams were plagued by base marks in the Mixed Duet Technical program, the 2019 world champions Aleksandr Maltsev, 30, and Mayya Gurbanberdieva, 26, were the first pair to perform and clung to first place with a score of 233.2100 for their program about De-evolution that was intended to be a statement about the decline of the natural world and the rise of digitization and artificial intelligence.
The victory marked a tremendous comeback for Maltsev, who had claimed world championship silvers in 2015 and 2017 with two different partners before winning the 2019 (and 2025) title with Gurbanberdieva.
“I’m very happy that I can compete again with Mayya,” Malstsev said. “She is one of the best partners in the world. I’m so happy that she could come back to the sport after her shoulder injury and we could show beautiful routines.”
Spain’s 21-year-old star Dennis Gonzalez Boneu picked up his second world championship silver medal in this event – this time with medical student Mireia Hernandez Luna. The pair had the tightest synchronization in the field during their slow-ish Hip-Hop routine that had produced gold at several World Cup events in 2025.
Their chemistry was clear. “We understand each other very well,” Hernandez Luna explained, and “we tried to convey how we let the magic flow in our lives through our duet.”
Italy finished third, 5.1825 points behind the winners. Filippo Pelati, 18, captured Wednesday’s bronze with the 2022 world champion Lucrezia Ruggiero, 25, whose 2022 partner Giorgio Minisini was in the stands.
Compared to the bronze Pelati had earned two days earlier in the Men’s Solo Free event, he said, “I prefer this medal; it has a different meaning for me. This medal is for all the training with Lucrezia. I really enjoyed the moment and didn’t overthink. I was only thinking of the next step, the corrections, elements, the technicality of the routine – and to do a clean swim with an artistic impression.”
Great Britain’s Ranjuo Tomblin, 19, and Isabelle Thorpe, 24, had the hardest routine of all, and were off to a tremendous start when three of the five element judges awarded 10.0s for their first Acro Pair. In the end, they placed fourth, less than two points away from a medal.
Mexico and China had no base marks and finished fifth and sixth.
In contrast, the defending world champions from 2024, Nargiza Bolatova, 21, and Eduard Kim, 19, of Kazakhstan made a series of small synchronization errors early. Three of their seven elements required review, and they ended up with a base mark on their final hybrid to place seventh overall.
Up Next:
The lone artistic swimming final on Thursday will be Women’s Duet Free. Will the Alexandri sisters of Austria sweep both Women’s Duet golds in Singapore? Or will the Lins of China claim the gold to accompany their Duet Tech silver?