‘Smiling so you can’t see the pain’: why artistic swimming is so tough

Great Britain has never won an Olympic medal in artistic swimming – the sport previously known as synchronised swimming. But Kate Shortman, 22, and Izzy Thorpe, 23, are intent on making history – and defying glib misconceptions – in Paris.

This year they won Britain’s first world championship medals in the sport. And while artistic swimming may seem graceful and effortless, making it look easy is far from simple. The pair spend at least 40 hours a week working on their swimming, gymnastics, flexibility, yoga and routines – as well as lifting weights.

As they spend much of their three minute routine under water, the pair also do apnoea – or breathwork – training and can hold their breath for three minutes and 30 seconds.

“I can’t stress how hard the sport is,” says Shortman. “Because it’s so glamorous and we put on costumes, it’s a distraction from how hard it is. You have to be very athletic, very fit, flexible and strong. It encompasses everything really. And, just to say, the smile is fake.”

Thorpe adds: “We’re supposed to be smiling so you can’t see the pain.”

It helps that the pair have been best friends since primary school and, incredibly, this is the second generation of Shortman-Thorpe duets, with their mothers just missing out on the 1996 Olympics.

Karen Thorpe, Izzy’s mum, who is coaching and leading the team into Paris, says that while the pair grew up together in the same city, neither parents expected it would happen, “but it did and now Kate is like my other daughter as well.”

She confirms just how hard the women work. “We do Monday to Saturday, pretty much every single week,” she says. “They start at 8am at the gym, with the strength and conditioning coach. And then after an hour and a half they’re straight over to the pool until 5pm every day.”

She adds” “When their Japanese coach, Yumiko Tomomatsu, is over they don’t go home at that point, either. They then have to stay for a video review and focus on corrections for the following day.”

Shortman and Thorpe have to train at a local community pool in Bristol alongside aqua joggers and community swimmers – who do not like the music for their routines to be played too loud.

This will be the pair’s second Olympics, and they considered quitting after finishing 14th in Tokyo. It did not help that they didn’t receive any lottery funding until recently. Or that they often had to work on Sundays after spending the rest of the week training and doing their degrees.

However, the appointment of Tomomatsu in May 2022, and a huge change in how the sport is judged have completely transformed their prospects. “The old system was purely a judged system,” says Karen. “So if your country was powerful and had been doing well for years, then you probably were on top of the pile.

“But now every move we do has an associated degree of difficulty – just like gymnastics. And so the judges are there to say: ‘Oh, they’re this high out the water, they performed that on a perfect vertical line,’ and then they can give us a score accordingly.

“I always knew that our girls were super-technical, and could do all the hard moves, but they never really got the credit for it. But now if they do exactly what they say on the tin, they score the points.”

Karen stresses that creativity does still pay a part. “The weighting is more towards the side of the difficulty, but there is the element of artistic impression, which is the choreography side. So we have tried to make our routines as creative as we can.”

So what can fans expect when the pair swim in Paris? “We have two routines,” Izzy says. “One of them is called the Rising Phoenix. This is about our sport coming out in its new form – like it’s rising from the ashes. We also wanted something British-themed and so the other is based on a Big Ben clock.”

While the Chinese are big favourites, do not be surprised if Team GB dazzle their way to silver or bronze. “The sport has changed so much since I did it,” adds Karen. “It’s a different ballgame. We used to move much slower or gracefully underwater, but now it’s super-fast and dynamic.”