Synchronized Swimming Sucks

So why does synchronized swimming suck?

I have never seen a sport as ridiculous as synchronized swimming. One could respond with the inevitable point that professional wrestling is even more ridiculous, but at least that doesn't pretend to be a sport. Let me see if I have this straight - two women walk up to the pool in frilly bathing suits and with gelatin in their hair, raise their arms and grin rapaciously, then jump into the water and move their arms and legs in perfect synchronization. It looks as silly as it is - the whole performance is choreographed cuteness set to bland background music with the kind of robotic movements much less sophisticated than the kind you'd see from an untrained street mime. At least street mimes don't mug as much as these girls.

Synchronized swimming is the new, euphemistic name for water ballet, which is what Esther Williams used to do in all those Technicolor movies of the forties and fifties. These movies were built around a lot of water and not a lot of plot, for Williams, masterful swimmer that she was (the cancellation of the 1940 Olympics in World War II derailed her dream of swimming in the Games), was no actress. As Columbia studio honcho Harry Cohn always said of her, "Dry, she ain't much. Wet, she's a star." Okay, some of those water ballet routines were pretty to look at, but then they were filmed in elaborate sound stages with brilliant colors and fabulous lighting. Olympic synchronized swimming, by contrast, is held in a boring old pool.

Also notice that Olympic synchronized swimming isn't open to men? Hey, why not? There were guys in all those Esther Williams movies. Well, they were paid to swim in those movies, while the most you can get out of Olympic synchronized swimming is a gold medal. But the biggest reason there's no men's synchronized swimming in the Olympics is because men look even more ridiculous doing it. Again, I cite Esther Williams movies - the guys in those water ballets look pretty dumb, a point also driven home by one of the funniest "Saturday Night Live" films ever made, featuring Harry Shearer and Martin Short as male synchronized swimmers hoping to be ready for the Olympics when the event is opened to men. My rule of thumb is, if one gender is ill-suited to a "sport," it's not a sport. This is pretty much my attitude toward American football, since it's not a game women should or should want to play . . .but that's another post.

Synchronized swimmers - water ballerinas - repsond to the charge that what they do is not a sport by citing how difficult it is to swim with such exact choreography, and how hard it is to hold your breath in the water. Hey, I don't deny that it's hard. I'm sure it's very hard, harder than regular swimming. But so is walking on a tightrope blindfolded, but no one calls that a sport. Just because something takes a lot of physical effort doesn't make it a sport. If it did, building a house would qualify as an Olympic event.

NBC Sports president Dick Ebersol (who was the producer of "Saturday Night Live" when Shearer and Short made that funny film) has wisely relegated this event to Bravo this time, and out of prime time. Even he knows it's ridiculous. Besides, those girls freak me out with their smiles. One of the first synchronized simmers in the Olympics, 1984 medalist Tracie Ruiz (who got married and became Tracie Ruiz-Conforto), in fact, became a commentator on the "sport" for NBC. When I saw her as a commentator, I gasped. That same smile she had as an Olympic competitor was still stuck on her face!

Scary, no? :-O