New-look artistic swimming team competition kicks off with United States eyeing podium

The 2024 Olympic inventive swimming workforce competitors will get underway Monday, and for the primary time since 2008, america is within the subject. And never solely that, the eight ladies representing the Stars and Stripes may realistically be within the combine for gold.

The competitors begins with the technical routine, the primary of three phases of the revamped workforce competitors which incorporates, for the primary time, an acrobatic routine along with the technical and free routines.

U.S. head coach Andrea Fuentes mentioned she thinks the addition of the third part will make the workforce competitors extra unpredictable than in years previous.

“We’ve at all times been a bit bit bored of how each competitors we knew what was going to be the rank for years and that is the primary time frame that inventive swimming has an unknown rank and the whole lot can occur,” Fuentes, a 4 time Olympic medalist for Spain, mentioned. 

The addition of the inventive routine, which emphasizes airborne and platform parts, performs to Staff USA’s strengths. At each the 2023 and 2024 World Championships, the place medals are awarded for every routine, america completed on the acrobatic routine podium.

“We determined from the start to take excessive danger (issue), and we’re fairly pleased with that as a result of it has been opening the door to success since we have now modified that,” Fuentes mentioned.

Inventive swimming on the Paris Video games will even characteristic an overhauled scoring system designed to make the competitors extra goal.

America will carry out because the seventh of 10 nations within the technical routine, to the tune of Michael Jackson’s “Clean Legal.”

The inventive swimming technical competitors might be watched on Peacock and NBCOlympics.com starting at 1:30 p.m. ET, and on E! at 2:00 p.m. ET.