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GRETCHEN REYNOLDS

The Washington Post

SAINT-DENIS, France — A long dry spell for U.S. artistic swimming ended with a splash Wednesday night, when the Americans took the silver medal at the Paris Olympics, finishing behind a dominant Chinese team and just ahead of Spain.

The U.S. team — with Calgary’s Jaime Czarkowski as a centrepiece — hadn’t even qualified for the Olympics since 2008, and they last won a team medal — bronze — at the 2004 Athens Games.

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Coached since 2019 by four-time Spanish Olympic artistic swimmer Andrea Fuentes, the Americans have soared in the international standings, including a second-best overall score, behind China, at the world championships earlier this year. Russia, which was not invited to these Olympics, had won every Olympic gold medal since 2000.

The team artistic swimming contest consisted of three nights of competition during which swimmers performed technical, free and acrobatic routines.

Entering the final night of competition at the Aquatics Centre, the United States was in second place after China, thanks to an almost flawless performance Tuesday in the free routine.

They also placed fourth Monday in the precision-driven technical routine, winning over the crowd — and the internet — with their underwater, upside-down moonwalk to Michael Jackson’s Smooth Criminal.

Wednesday’s session featured what are known as acrobatic routines, a new addition to the sport for this Olympics, with athletes launching their teammates into high-flying somersaults, mid-air splits and occasional face splats.

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The acrobatics routine was designed to be telegenic and crowd-pleasing, and, if the crowd decibels were any indication, it worked.

And the final scores underscored just how ascendant the Chinese are. They placed first all three nights and wound up with a cumulative score of 996.1389 to the United States’ 914.3421 and Spain’s 900.7319. France was fourth with 886.6487 points. Japan put up 880.6841 in fifth.

Artistic swimming at the Olympics concludes with the duet artistic swimming routines Friday — with the technical swim (11:30 a.m. MT) — and Saturday — with the free program (11:30 a.m. MT) — with Czarkowski in the water for USA.

CANADA SIXTH

Canada, with Calgary’s Jonnie Newman in the stack position, finished sixth.

Newman and the Canadians put together an 859.2229-point performance after finishing sixth in Wednesday’s acrobatic routine.

It was another Canadian, however, in Czarkowski who was able to muster a medal from the event with the Americans.

“You could feel the energy from each other in the water,” American team member Jacklyn Luu told the Los Angeles Times. “It worked so well — each routine, each lift that we did — it was just magical.”

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“As soon as we finished our first platform lift and we nailed it, I was like, ‘OK, I have the rest of this,’” American flyer Audrey Kwon told the Times. “And I knew we were set.”

LOCALS AT THE GAMES

Also on Day 12:

• Calgary diver Margo Erlam finished 22nd in the qualifying round of the women’s 3-metre springboard event. She scored 258.30 points, which left her shy of advancing to the final day of the diving discipline.

Erlam’s best score on the day was 61.50 on her third dive — the reverse two-and-a-half somersault dive from a pike position. She also posted 58.50 points with a back two-and-half somersault dive from a pike position.

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