The History of Synchronized Swimming Is More Than Esther Williams

On a recent evening, a half-dozen members of the D.C. Synchromasters were warming up poolside at an outdoor swim club in Fairfax, Va.

A portable underwater speaker started playing Deorro’s hit “Bailar,” and the group snapped to attention for a “hand drill” — using their hands to mark where their legs would need to be, timed to the beat.

Swimmers jumped in to run through some vertical spins, lifts and barracudas (which involve thrusting the body straight up out of the water while upside down). A few stayed up top, clustered around Vicki Valosik, who is not just a team member but the author of the new book “Swimming Pretty: The Untold Story of Women in Water.”

“Oooh,” one teammate said as Valosik pulled an advance copy out of her bag. “Is that the book in the flesh?”

To many, synchronized swimming (or “artistic swimming,” as the competitive sport is now called, after a rebrand in 2017) may be synonymous with over-the-top 1950s Esther Williams aqua-spectaculars like “Million Dollar Mermaid” — or perhaps the classic 1984 “Saturday Night Live” skit mocking what was then a newly minted Olympic sport.

But in “Swimming Pretty,” Valosik puts the sport in a wide historical frame, showing how the very idea of women going into the water has both reflected and driven social change.

“A lot of people see synchro as a niche sport, but it’s tied in with women learning to swim, with lifesaving, with women showing people what they can do physically,” she said. “It’s not just this light and fluffy thing with flowered swim caps.”

Which isn’t to say the book, just published by Liveright, is just a worthy story of uplift. The story of “synchro,” as practitioners call it, reflects a persistent tension between athleticism and entertainment, and Valosik doesn’t stint on the latter. “Swimming Pretty” features plenty of “who knew?” moments and a teeming cast of characters, like Victorian-era “water queens” who performed elaborate stunts in glass-fronted tanks, and Annette Kellerman, an early-20th-century champion swimmer turned fitness guru and star of stage and screen.

In her day, Kellerman, one of the first women to seriously attempt a crossing of the English Channel, was a huge celebrity. She pioneered sleek and functional one-piece bathing suits for women, and is credited as the first woman to appear nude in a movie (“Neptune’s Daughter,” from 1914).

“It’s amazing how forgotten she is,” Valosik said.

Valosik, 44, a petite blonde with arms toned from hours of sculling (the fluttering movement swimmers use to propel themselves), showed up for a pre-practice interview in a sleeveless blouse printed with retro swimmers in various float patterns. But growing up outside Nashville, she had little interest in sports.

She came to “synchro” somewhat accidentally about a dozen years ago, with the encouragement of a former boss, an amateur figure skater. She found a meet-up of D.C. Synchromasters, a competitive masters team that evolved out a local group, the Aqua Gems, which performed in water shows in the 1960s.

When Valosik first jumped in the pool, she had a typical newbie reaction.

“It was insane how hard it was,” she said. “I thought, my chest is primarily two bags of air, and I’m supposed to just gracefully push it down into the water?”

Within a year, Valosik, who currently works as a writing teacher and editor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, was competing (not well, she said). Curious about the sport’s history, she also started diving into the archives.

Her first trip was to the International Swimming Hall of Fame, in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. She found scrapbooks from figures like Aileen Riggin, who at the 1920 Olympics became the first woman to win a gold medal in springboard diving (she was just 14), and Wilbert E. “ Longfellow, an early-20th-century water safety pioneer who staged elaborate pageants to promote his goal of “the waterproofing of America.”

There was also wholly unexpected stuff, like a collection relating to the early-20th-century “diving girls” — daredevils who performed in venues from seedy carnivals to Broadway theaters, plunging from heights of up to 100 feet into pools as small as 12 feet across and six feet deep.

There was already a history of the competitive sport, published in 2005 by Dawn Pawson Bean, a former speed swimmer who went on to compete on and coach many synchro teams. As Valosik continued researching, she found herself particularly fascinated by the sport’s many-stranded prehistory, and the various ways women had sought pleasure and competition in the water.

“It became like an origin story,” Valosik said of her project. “I was just fascinated by everything that had come before.”

In 2021, after she published an article in The Atlantic about the sport’s rebranding as “artistic swimming,” she got a call from Gina Iaquinta at Liveright, a division of W.W. Norton.

“I loved the way she slipped in all the history,” Iaquinta said. “It promised to be a great trade book, which mimicked the sport itself — rigorous, but also fun.”

“Swimming Pretty” has drawn largely admiring reviews so far. In The Wall Street Journal, the dance critic Sarah L. Kaufman called the book an “enlightening, well researched history,” though she expressed disappointment that Valosik didn’t give readers more of an inside look at what it’s like to compete.

From early on, the very idea of women competing in the water, as opposed to cavorting attractively, was troubling to some. In 1912, when the Olympics added women’s swimming and platform diving, the U.S. Olympic Committee declined to send any athletes, saying it was “opposed to women taking part in any event in which they could not wear long skirts.”

Others feared that vigorous exercise of any kind would make women mannish and ugly. “It is a lady’s business to look beautiful, and there are hardly any sports in which she seems able to do it,” Paul Gallico, a prominent sports journalist, wrote in Vogue in 1936.

Valosik’s title comes from the theater impresario Billy Rose, who in 1937 staged the first of his elaborate water shows, known as the Aquacade. When Esther Williams, a teenage racing champion whose Olympic dreams were dashed by the cancellation of the 1940 games, auditioned for the show, he was blunt: “I don’t want fast. I want pretty.”

“Mr. Rose,” she retorted, “if you’re not strong enough to swim fast, you’re probably not strong enough to swim ‘pretty.’”

In 1941, Williams made the leap to Hollywood, where she made 21 movies for MGM, most of them lavish “aquamusicals” like the 1952 hit “Million Dollar Mermaid.” Valosik emphasizes the athleticism and daring behind the glamour-girl smile. On set, Williams suffered at least seven broken eardrums, multiple brushes with hypoxic blackout and, after a six-story dive in an elaborate headdress, three broken vertebrae and temporary loss of use of her arms.

Williams quit the movie business in the mid-1950s as her box office appeal faded, and largely disappeared from the public eye. But even decades later, the fledgling competitive sport was still struggling to distance itself from her legacy, or at least the condescension toward it.

“It is a rare synchro athlete that doesn’t suffer from the showbiz stereotype of Esther backstroking effortlessly across the big screen,” Swimming World magazine lamented in 1985.

Today, the sport showcases increasingly difficult (and dangerous) moves — a point driven home at the 2022 world championships, when the American swimmer Anita Alvarez passed out during a solo routine and had to be rescued by her coach.

But there is also a counterbalancing “nostalgic” strand, Valosik notes, exemplified by the Aqualillies, a retro performance group (including some former Olympians) that has appeared in the film “Hail, Caesar!” and series like “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” and “Glee.” (The group’s annual water show honoring Williams’s birthday will be held on Aug. 8 in Los Angeles.)

The gender politics of the sport are also shifting. In the run-up to this year’s Olympics in Paris, a big story line has been whether the veteran Bill May, 45, would become the first male artistic swimmer to compete in the Olympics, following a 2022 rule change.

May, a member of the 2023 U.S. senior national team, didn’t make the cut. But the growing presence of men, Valosik writes, is a sign that a sport derided as frouffy and ridiculous “has fully arrived.”

Still, her message is a pointedly feminist one.

“I hope the book gives readers a fresh perspective on the diverse paths to women’s liberation in the 20th century — one that took place in the water,” she said.