The term “synchronized swimming” dates to the 1934 Chicago World’s Fair, where physical educator Katharine Curtis debuted a new style of group swimming set to music. Curtis soon founded co-ed synchronized swimming clubs at two different teaching colleges in Chicago, and when the two groups held a synchro swim-off in 1939, it marked the sport’s first competition.
Soon after, synchronized swimming was accepted into the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), the governing body for competitive sports at the time. It did so, however, as separate events for women and men. That decision would prove to be the death knell for men in the sport, as there was little interest in male-only synchro events and within a few years their competitions stopped altogether.
The world of show business reinforced the view of synchronized swimming as an activity for women—from filmmaker Busby Berkeley’s water ballets featuring female swimmers in shifting kaleidoscopic patterns to theater impresario Billy Rose’s world’s fair “Aquacades,” whose swimmers were often likened to wet Rockettes. The star of Rose’s California Aquacade, Esther Williams, was recruited by MGM to swim in their splashy Technicolor “aquamusicals,” which catapulted the national swimming champion to stardom and further glamorized the water.
By the mid-1950s, there were—according to Sports Illustrated—roughly 25,000 practitioners of synchronized swimming in the U.S., and the sport had been accepted by FINA, the international swimming federation, as a new aquatic discipline for women. With this international growth, synchro swimmers set their sights on the Olympics, but their lobbying to the all-male IOC was repeatedly ignored. IOC President Avery Brundage, who called synchronized swimming “aquatic vaudeville,” hadn’t wanted women in the Olympics in the first place—even suggesting as late as 1953 that eliminating all women’s events could be a way for the IOC to cut costs.
Once the Title IX era began in the early 1970s, however, being a women’s sport was suddenly no longer a hindrance. With the U.S. mandate to eliminate gender-based discrimination in schools signed into law, a widespread movement toward greater women’s inclusion in sports spread internationally, and synchro was accepted for the 1984 Olympics, along with rhythmic gymnastics, another women-only sport. The New York Times declared them the new Olympic “glamour events.” The majority of articles about synchronized swimming focused on its aesthetics like hair gel and bedazzled costumes worn by the athletes, further cementing the idea that the world of competitive synchro was a feminine, performative domain.