The class looked like it was going to start elegantly enough; the swimmers lined up on the pool's edge, poised to delicately dive in the water, one after the other.
Then one student decided to use the ladder. Another's nose clip went missing as soon as she pierced the water. "Do you have a spare?" her classmate asked, diving from the surface and scanning the pool floor.
It turns out that synchronized swimming -- often lumped with cheerleading, ballroom dancing and other activities as hobbies rather than sports -- is a lot harder than it looks. It takes flexibility, strength, grace, lung capacity and muscles that most people don't usually use. Just learning how to float on your back and lifting your leg out of water is an achievement.
Sue Acampora, a YMCA swimming teacher, started teaching synchronized-swimming classes at the Central YMCA this fall. She instruacts a small but enthusiastic group of three: a teenager and two women in their mid-50s, taking the class for fun and exercise.
It's slow-going, though. When Acampora held a free introductory class after Labor Day, her first group included some younger girls who thought that synchronized swimming was something like gymnastics or dance in water, that is, with somewhere to stand. Maybe they can be forgiven. Hasn't every kid spent a water-logged summer doing headstands and cartwheels across a pool floor?
The problem: You can't use the bottom.
Part gymnastics, part competitive swimming, diving and dance, synchronized swimming, or "synchro," has always struggled for a bit of legitimacy in a world used to measuring athletic success by points, goals and stopwatches.
In the Central Y's pool on a recent afternoon, kids in a class yelped as they took turns jumping into the water in life jackets. The after-work crowd churned out laps in the lanes. In one corner, Acampora injected a bit of quiet beauty into the choppy water as she led her students down two lanes, from the deep end, 11½ feet deep, to the shallow, flipping, twisting and raising their legs into pointy-toed ballerina lifts. They swirled their hands and arms under the water -- a motion called "sculling" that helps propel the swimmers and support their bodies -- and practiced moves that look like the aquatic cousins of cartwheels and somersaults, and floating in precise formations. "Let's go left," Acampora said, floating with her three students in a circle. "Try to keep our feet together. Watch your toes! Nice straight legs!"
Later, Acampora took her students back to the deep end for another exercise. They took turns doing surface dives, then they spiraled in and out of the water upside-down. It's tough -- more often than not, their legs listed to one side even as they tried to stay straight. "I thought I was vertical," said Linda McCoy, upright again. "I was nowhere near vertical."
Americans and Canadians contributed to the early days of synchronized-swimming as a competitive sport, though "water ballet," as it was originally called didn't become an Olympic sport until 1984.
Katharine Curtis experimented with aquatic tricks when she was a student at the University of Wisconsin in 1915, according to Synchronized Swimming: An American History by Dawn Pawson Bean. Curtis started a water-ballet club at the University of Chicago in the 1920s. In 1933 and 1934, 60 of her swimmers, the Modern Mermaids, performed at the World's Fair. College clubs sprung up around the country.
By the 1940s and '50s, former U.S swimming champion Esther Williams was floating and flipping on screen in such films as Million Dollar Mermaid, Bathing Beauty and Dangerous When Wet, popularizing the sport for the masses. Now in her 80s, Williams lends to her name to a line of vintage-inspired swimwear, including one that looks like a waterproof version of Marilyn Monroe's famous fluttering white dress.
Though it's a sport still dominated by women, synchronized swimming today is anything but genteel.
They smile from ear to ear, and wear heavy eye make-up, with glittery bathing suits and hairpieces to match, but synchronized swimmers' bodies are as muscled and as strong as gymnasts. Competitive routines typically last three to four minutes -- swimmers are underwater from a third to about half of that time, said Ginny Jasontek, a former president of U.S. Synchronized Swimming and a coach at a YMCA in Cincinnati. Her team includes high-school students who can swim two pool lengths -- 50 yards -- underwater without coming up for a breath.
Teams at this year's Olympic games flipped one another into the air, balanced on each other's hands and feet, and spun and swirled under and out of the water -- in time with one another and to music (pumped through underwater speakers), touching the bottom of the pool. The routines were dynamic even when the teams were on the surface. The Chinese team included a circular form with a twist -- laying on their backs, the seven members of the team supported an eighth woman who rolled on her back, break dancing on her teammates' legs. The Chinese won bronze. Russia won gold. The United States placed fifth.
Much like figure skaters, synchronized swimmers are judged on their technical and artistic abilities. Swimmers can perform as individuals, in duets or as teams.
Though synchronized swimming is less popular in the Southeast, the Junior Pan-American Championships will be held in August 2009 in Huntersville, with top high-school synchronized swimmers coming from all over North America and South America.
Acampora started synchronized swimming when she was 19, taking lessons with the Fairfax County Parks and Recreation Department in northern Virginia. Now 48, she has taught water fitness and swimming at the Y for about three years. She would like to have at least four more students so that she could have adult and youth groups, and have the class be a developmental program for a competitive team, though that will take some equipment, such as underwater speakers, as well as more swimmers.
Synchronized swimming can be a good fit for people who have dabbled in competitive swimming but lose patience with all the laps, Acampora said, or who have experience in gymnastics or dance.
And it's a good workout even if you don't compete, particularly for such under-used muscles as triceps.
"I think at any age, it's great sport for your body because it requires you to have strength and flexibility," Jasontek said.
McCoy, 55, teaches spinning and water-fitness classes at the Y. Twice a week this fall, she has been donning her nose clip for Acampora's class. When she started, she couldn't lie on her back and hold her leg out of the water -- a move called "ballet leg" -- even once. Now, she can do ballet legs down much of the length of the pool.
"This is as intense as everything else," she said, on land again after a recent class. "You're upside down, underwater, trying to get yourself oriented.
"Forty-minutes of synchronized swimming, it would be harder than swimming an hour and a half of laps. But it's much more fun."
Nora Graver decided to try synchronized swimming after she saw it advertised at the Y. "I always liked doing handstands as a child," she said.
And there's that appealing touch of yesteryear kitsch. At 55, Graver doesn't remember Esther Williams from her childhood, but she certainly knows about her.
"She does a backstroke so sensual it should be banned," she said.
■ Laura Giovanelli can be reached at 727-7302 or at lgiovanelli@wsjournal.com.
■ YMCA members pay $35 for four weeks of synchronized-swimming classes. The class meets twice a week. Non-members pay $70. Call 721-2100 for more information.
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