Dennis González hugged his coach Anna Vega after obtaining 193.03 points in the free solo final. The young Spanish swimmer, just 19 years old, had changed the exercise of the semifinal, in which he had finished fourth, adding difficulty to be able to fight for the medals. “It's something we had practiced and they were prepared without realizing it,” Anna Vega explains to EL MUNDO.
That, “without realizing it”, is key in the new Spain of the national team, Mayuko Fujiki, who was the right hand of Anna Tarrés. “We have suffered to create routines without losing difficulty, but maintaining our style,” defines the coach to this newspaper from her room in Fukuoka where her team had made history.
Without great soloists like Gemma Mengual, Andrea Fuentes or Ona Carbonell today in the national team's technical team, Spain has had the most choral triumph in its history. The team has obtained 6 medals, three of them gold (Fernando Díaz del Río in technical solo, Dennis González in free solo and also in team technical routine), one silver (Emma García and Dennis González in mixed technical duet) and two bronzes (Iris Tió in technical solo and technical duet, partnering with Alisa Ozhogina).
How have you achieved the greatest success of Spanish artistic swimming in history? “Spain needed young athletes to grow together,” reveals Mayuko, 'Mayu', about her return to our team after a successful stint in China. “We did not want quick results, the greater the time together, the greater the synchronization,” he adds.
The Spanish prospects were focused on Paris 2024 or even Los Angeles 2028. However, many of these young people have exploded before, especially the boys who, unfortunately, will not be able to have a presence in the Olympic Games since their disciplines are not contemplated in them..
In fact, of the six medals in these world championships, only three have been in Olympic disciplines: the team technical routine, the technical duo and the technical solo, the latter two with Iris Tió as great promise. “Iris is growing to become a star, her predecessors also took almost 10 years”, says Fujiki and recounted the evolution of Gemma Mengual who obtained her first and only gold at the age of 32.
Iris Tió and Alisa Ozhogina in the duet. EFE
Another key is training.. Harder, more physical, more specific and adapted to the new standards. “We live in the water,” Fujiki begins about the time they spend in the pool, between eight and nine hours a day, to then detail how they have focused on the “technique” of young swimmers to mechanize their movements.
Finally, knowing that the purely artistic part of the Spanish team is their strong point, they have done many 'acroyoga' exercises (a fusion between acrobatics and yoga) to guide the exercises and their difficulty to the new Olympic categories, such as Acrobatic, which involves seven exits from the water during the routine, and in which the swimmers have to form a base for one of their partners to perform a pirouette out of the water.. “We practice acroyoga a lot in confinement, since we don't have water,” Fujiki reveals.
The last key, and perhaps most important, is the adaptation to the new artistic swimming regulations approved by the International Swimming Federation (FINA) just a few months ago.. This new regulation, a priori, “we have suffered a lot because it favors less artistic teams,” says the national team.
It is a more objective and less creative scoring model, where predefined movements are scored and, where the key to everything lies, it penalizes failure much more. “We work with a risk mentality because we want to be leaders in the sport and because we have a lot of talent in the water and we are very ambitious outside,” says trainer Anna Vega.
Vega talks about “betting on difficulty but knowing where athletes can go without failing”. To refine so much, Spain has spent testing these new routines and doing pilot tests in all the preliminaries that have taken place before the World Cup.. Thus, when the big date arrived, they only had to put into practice what they had previously tried.
Dennis González in the free solo final. KoszticsakEFE
When Dennis González hugged Anna with his 193 points, there were still two swimmers to go out. The last one was the great favourite, the American Kenneth Gaudet, who, in addition, had reached the final with the best exercise. When Gaudet finished, the North American delegation jumped for joy while the young swimmer went to wait for his note on the typical sofa. One minute, two, the note did not come out. The judges observed in the video review that the swimmer had made a mistake. That small mistake cost him not only gold, but also silver.
Effort, art and surgical precision, Spain has a recipe for its resurrection. We will see if they consolidate it in Doha in 2024 and win a ticket to Paris and once again set the artistic agenda. “We don't have a star, but we have a great team with great strong, flexible swimmers… we have a lot of variety. Although we are also at the point of creating an important soloist,” Fujiki warns.