One would have to go back a decade, to the 2013 World Cup in Barcelona, ??to see Spain with seven medals in elite artistic swimming, second in the table, tied with Japan. The last metal, bronze in a free mixed duet, fell yesterday at the closing of the program by the Catalan couple Mireia Hernández and Dennis González, she from Lloret and he from Rubí.
The 19-year-old from CN Kallípolis in Barcelona stands as the best artistic swimmer in the world: in Fukuoka he has won three of those seven medals, one gold (in solo free), one silver (in mixed technical duet, with Emma Garcia) and now bronze in duet free.
Dennis González touches heaven after having experienced the hell of bullying at school and the usual contempt suffered by male artists for practicing “a girl’s sport”.
“You always attract attention because you are the only boy in a common girls’ sport, you know that all eyes look at you, but I don’t feel strange,” González told this newspaper in 2021, when, at the age of 16, he was the only boy in the group of 12 scholarships that Alba Cabello trained at Blume de Esplugues.
“Dennis is very smart, nothing to do with Pau [Ribes], who had a hard time catching the choreographies. Dennis learned it in five minutes; I freaked out with him ”, explained the former swimmer and coach.
González’s story is similar to the one lived by Pau Ribes, his great reference, the pioneer of masculine syncro. Dennis, son of an artistic coach and brother of a swimmer, went to the pool as a child and was signed up for water polo at CN Rubí. “But I wasn’t interested; it was a very aggressive sport. I don’t like aggressive or contact sports.
Everything changed when Rubí invited Ribes to do an exhibition. Dennis was excited. “Why couldn’t I do it? So I tried, when I was 11 years old. They pointed me to the Kallipolis. There he was the only boy; the girls saw me as an outsider. They always sneaked me some. To win them over, I established a good relationship with one and after a year I got along with all of them”.
But at school it was not the same. “They bullied me. They beat me when I was little, even before doing synchro. When I started ESO I changed centers and sports. When I started to do art, I suffered the comments of the idiots in the class, they called me a ‘faggot’, but I learned to get by, not to let it affect me. There were classmates who were freaked out by what he did.”
For example, at the age of 15 he was already silver in the 2019 Children’s World Cup in Samorin (Slovakia). Her progression was unstoppable. Golds and silvers in world cups followed one another, until the final projection in the Fukuoka World Cup.
Between Dennis, Fernando Díaz del Río, Iris Tió (also three medals), Mireia Hernández, Alisa Ozhogina and the team have saved Spanish swimming.
