Artistic swimming experienced a golden age in Spain at the beginning of the 21st century. Led first by Gemma Mengual and later by Ona Carbonell, both trained under the discussed methods of Anna Tarrés, the Spanish team accumulated medals practically routinely in all international events. With that glorious stage closed, a journey through the desert seemed to open up for the specialty, but the new batch of swimmers is shining with its own light.
The 2022 World Cup, the first without the stars of the past, left a balance of a single bronze that predicted few visits to the podium in the following years. However, it was only the seed of what was to come. At the Fukuoka World Cup event last year, in which the male swimmers’ choreographies were premiered, the Spanish artist’s collection was seven medals, her best record equaled with Barcelona 2013, and in the current edition in Doha the pupils and pupils of the Japanese Mayuko Fujiki have collected four metals. The next challenge is to make a mark at Paris 2024 this summer.
This past Saturday, on the last day of the artistic competition in the Qatar pool, the couple made up of Dennis González and Mireia Hernández won silver in the freestyle. It was Spain’s fourth medal in the discipline and the sixth in total so far in the World Cup, along with the silver of María de Valdés in open water and the bronze of the jumpers Nicolás García Boissier and Adrián Abadía.
A penalty, or base mark as it is officially known, cruelly separated them from the podium in the mixed technical duo, with the bitter fourth place, but González and Hernández more than made up for it in the free final. The two Catalan swimmers improved the bronze that Spain achieved in Fukuoka in the same event with a dance in the water to the rhythm of hip-hop. With dynamic and very powerful music, taken from the movie Set Up, the Spanish couple (208.3583) was only behind the Chinese Wentao Cheng and Haoyu Shi, champions with a score of 224.1437. The bronze, very close, was taken by the Mexicans Trinidad Meza and Diego Villalobos (192.5772) by less than one point over the Colombians Jennifer Cerquera and Gustavo Sánchez (191.8729).
“We were left with the bad feelings of the technical duo and we thought about giving everything in the free duo. We were going with an added technical difficulty, but China has increased it even more. We did it very calmly and to be sure, we did it even better than we thought,” said González, from CN Kallipolis, satisfied. “What makes sport magical is the ambition to always want to go a little further. The previous World Cup was not even half a year ago and the improvement has been incredible, we have increased difficulty in all the routines and maintaining the artistic theme that is the beautiful part of Spain,” added Hernández, from CN Granollers.
The performance in the free duo was the great finishing touch in Doha for the artistic Spaniard, who had already achieved two silvers in technical team and free solo, again with Dennis González, and the bronze in technical duo with Iris Tió and Alisa Ozhogina. Four metals that allow us to go with optimism to the Paris Games, where, thanks to the merits achieved in the World Cup, Spain will have full representation by teams and in the women’s duo, since the solo and the mixed duo are not Olympic. However, in the French capital the men will debut as part of the team events with a maximum of two places. The Russian swimmers, great dominators of artistic swimming, will not be there either.