Two of the London Aquarium’s biggest attractions, the green sea turtles Boris and Dougie, had unexpected guests on Monday: the newest additions to Team GB’s squad for the Olympics with bold plans to take artistic swimming out of its shell.
Great Britain has never won an Olympic medal in the 40-year history of the event, previously known as synchronised swimming. Yet two university students, Kate Shortman and Izzy Thorpe, are set to make the most unlikely of splashes at the Paris Games after a string of superb performances.
Earlier this year the pair became the first Britons to win medals in the event at the World Aquatics Championships in Doha. And having also won World Cup gold inside the new Aquatics Centre in Paris last week, they now have their sights set on making history this summer – as well as shattering one or two preconceptions in the process.
“Is the ambition gold?” asks Thorpe, 23. “Absolutely.” Appropriately one of their medal-winning routines is based on raising the phoenix, which symbolises the regeneration of artistic swimming in Britain.
Meanwhile Mark England, Team GB’s chef de mission for Paris, said he is awe of what the pair have achieved. “They’ve done this alone,” he said. “They haven’t had anybody to look up to. So they are complete pioneers in their sport. For these guys to do it with very little financial support, is extraordinary. If they were to win a medal it would be groundbreaking.”
The story of the close friends, who have swum together since they were at primary school, is remarkable given that unlike most British sports they don’t get much financial help. Indeed, it only recently started receiving Lottery funding.
They also do most of their training at a local community pool in Bristol alongside aqua joggers and community swimmers – who don’t like the music for their routines to be played too loud.
They know their sport has been sneered at, poorly funded, and barely raised a ripple of interest. But they are now training up to 40 hours a week to be ready for the Olympic artistic swimming duet event under the expert eye of their Japanese coach Yumiko Tomomatsu.
“We’re training from 8am to 6pm or 7.30pm at the moment,” said Shortman, 22. “It is a lot of hours. We do swimming, gymnastics, flexibility, yoga, strength training with weights and a lot of technical work.
“I can’t stress just how hard the sport is. Because it’s so glamorous and we put on costumes and 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.”
The routines last three minutes and as the women spend much of it under water they also do apnea – or breath-hold – training. As a result they say they can hold their breath for around 3min 30sec under water if needed.
The dedication has made them one of the favourites for a medal in Paris, which is quite some progress after they failed to make the final at the Tokyo Games three years ago.
However they believe it is not just hard work that has led to the improvement but a radical change in the judging system, which has eliminated much of the bias that used to exist in the sport. Nowadays the swimmers are primarily scored on technical merit and the overall degree of difficulty of their routine as well as artistic impression and choreography.
It is not the only radical change to the event. Since its debut at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, only women have been permitted to compete in artistic swimming. However under new rules introduced in 2022, teams are allowed to include up to two men on their eight-person squads. The 45-year-old American Bill May is expected to be the first male to compete in the sport in Paris.
So how did Shortman and Thorpe find hanging out with Boris and Dougie, and their friend Zebby the zebra shark? “It was quite scary,” Thorpe says, smiling. “But it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.” The chance of stepping on to the podium in Paris, you sense, offers an even bigger thrill.
