Paris Olympics: How artistic swimmers learn to compete while holding their breath

Open this photo in gallery:

Imagine running a 20-second sprint, upside down, without being able to breathe.

Now take a single breath – while smiling – and do it again.

“It’s never easy. Every time you’re in – you feel it in your chest,” said Canadian synchronized swimmer Kenzie Priddell. “We’re human beings. Of course, we want to be breathing, but it’s really about mental focus. You have to just zone out any physical feelings and connect with your team and the moment.”

That’s what she did Monday night, when the Canadian artistic swimming team made its Olympic debut at the aquatic centre in Paris. (Synchronized swimming was renamed artistic swimming in 2017.)

Coming off a sixth-place finish in Tokyo, the Canadians were in seventh at the end of the technical event. They will perform twice more this week – the free routine is on Tuesday and the acrobatic program is on Wednesday – with each score being cumulative.

In the technical routine, teams perform a series of elements, including an acrobatic stunt where a swimmer is launched out of the water, as well as multiple “hybrids,” where athletes are upside down and underwater for a prolonged period of time, while performing rapid changes of leg positions, splits, and rotations.

“The first thing that’s marked is the amount of your body that’s out of the water,” explained Kerri Morgan, Canada’s chief sport officer for artistic swimming. “Then it’s the angle of the leg. The extension. The timing. How well synchronized we are with each other and your overall performance of the element.”

Teams refine these elements through constant repetition, video review and coaches positioned around the pool to look for subtle adjustments. The swimmers also do weight training, cardio, as well as flexibility work and train with outside coaches, such as gymnastics specialists, for help with the acro flips.

“One of our coaches is an aerial-ski coach. He comes in to help with movements in the air,” Morgan said.

Decades ago, swimmers might have been underwater for as long as a minute while performing hybrids, but the sport has moved in a safer direction, she said. Now, hybrids are often in the 20-second range. This is challenging in its own right, but the real difficulty comes from the fact that athletes must perform many hybrids in a row for a nearly three-minute program, with only a couple of breaths in between.

“And in our sport you’re marked by your facial expressions and artistic impression. So, when you come up for that breath, you have to look good when you do it,” she said. “You can’t look like you’re taking a bite of a big hamburger.”

Canadian swimmer Scarlett Finn – who, like six of Canada’s eight artistic-team members, is at her first Olympics – said they start learning to hold their breath as kids. Every year, the amount of time underwater gets longer and longer. On the national team, they practice five or six days a week.

“We do so many repetitions, we couldn’t be more prepared,” the 22-year-old said. So when their chests might start screaming for air, they know their bodies can handle it.

For Priddell, the strategy is to just not think about the lack of oxygen. Instead, she says she shifts her mind to focus on the counts, her arm and leg placement, where her teammates are.

“You really just need to calm down and keep your mind as calm as you can,” she said. “That’s, I think, how we push past the not-being-able-to-breathe part.”