Swim England Artistic Swimming

The home of artistic swimming in England

European synchro duet hit new high

European synchro duet Olivia Federici and Katie Clark secured their highest ever score for their ‘Snakes’ routine after a sharp and expressive performance in the Duet Free final.

The 2012 Olympians have only recently returned to the sport after a two-year hiatus, forming a partnership in December 2015, and their growing understanding of working as a pair is starting to show through their performances.

Yesterday they admitted that they have increased the difficulty of the routine since they qualified for Rio in March, and yet they still moved ahead of Israel’s Anastasia Gloushkov and Ievgeniia Tetelbaum in the rankings, finishing eighth overall.

Reactions of European synchro duet

“We’re really happy that we managed to improve our score,” said Clark. “We know we had a lot of things to improve on and refine from our prelim swim yesterday.

“We went away and we spent the time making the changes and so we’re really pleased with the better score.” – Katie Clark

Federici added: “It’s been great having the European Aquatics Championships here in London and an awesome opportunity to perform in front of a home audience.”

Click for the results from the Duel Free final here.

Confident performance in Team Free prelims

The European Team Free preliminary event also took place yesterday, and the British team put in a solid performance to go through in eighth place.

The girls make up a relatively new team, much like the Federici & Clark partnership, and they too are steadily becoming a real contender at this level of competition.

The Team Free squad finished with a score of 78.9667, and first time European competitor, 14-year old Katie Shortman, said that they have their sights set on an 80+ finish in the final.

“We’re really happy with that prelim performance and we had fun,” said Shortman. “We’re going to make some improvements and we hope we can push our score past 80.

“It’s really really exciting competing at my first Europeans. I had some nerves coming into London but I’m just glad that all my hard work has paid off and the team did really well this morning.” – Kate Shortman

“It was amazing to compete at this pool, it was kind of scary knowing that the Olympics were here in 2012. But the crowd were amazing and so loud as well, made us feel so confident as we walked on.”

Click for results from the Team Free prelims here.
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