Chinese duet wins artistic swimming gold; Britain takes silver

SAINT-DENIS, France -- With Russia out of the way, China is the new force in Olympic artistic swimming.

Twins Wang Liuyi and Wang Qianyi gave their country another gold in the sport formerly known as synchro, winning the duet competition at the Paris Olympics on Saturday night.

The Wangs built a lead in the technical routine the previous night and carried that momentum to a free routine dubbed "Gravitation," performed to music by Dutch DJ Junkie XL and German film score composer Hans Zimmer.

They crawled around the deck in their shiny suits like a couple of spiders before diving in. A pair of soaring flips drew "ahhhs" from the crowd, propelling the Wangs into a nearly three-minute routine mostly spent with heads underwater.

They received a total of 566.4783 points, holding off two teams that claimed the first artistic swimming medals for their countries.

Kate Shortman and Isabelle Thorpe of Britain earned the silver with 558.5367, edging out another set of twins, Noortje and Bregje de Brouwer, who took bronze for the Netherlands at 558.3963.

From Sydney in 2000 through Tokyo in 2021, Russia won every artistic swimming gold medal at the Olympics.

But that run of domination was assured of ending after the invasion of Ukraine, which led to Russia largely becoming a pariah on the international sporting stage. The country hasn't competed in a major international meet since.

The Wangs' victory capped a stellar couple of weeks for their country at the Olympic Aquatics Centre adjacent to the Stade de France.

The 6,000-seat venue was site of China's unprecedented sweep of all eight diving gold medals, the last of which came just a couple of hours before the Wangs made their country 2 for 2 in the artistic swimming events.

The twins were also part of the eight-person squad that won gold in the team competition, building on a career that already included world championships in 2022 and 2024 in both duet free and duet technical.