Eve Young and Florence Blinkhorn gain valuable World Cup experience

Eve Young and Florence Blinkhorn gained some valuable international experience at the opening leg of the Artistic Swimming World Cup in Beijing, China.

The competition featured nearly 100 artistic swimmers from 14 countries and regions who took part in the first of four events of the 2024 world cup season.

The event was held at the Chinese National Aquatic Centre which hosted Olympic competition at the Beijing Olympics in 2008 where the 17-year-olds finished tenth in the technical duet and eighth in the free duet event.

It was a good foundation for the junior squad members – who are also part of Swim England’s Diploma in Sporting Excellence (DiSE) Programme – in what was their first senior competition against some top level opposition.

The duet are a new pairing and aimed to set a benchmark to work at and improve on as they target a podium place at the Junior World Championships in Peru at the end of August.

They started off their programme with the Technical Duet on Saturday morning where they finished in tenth place.

Blinkhorn of Reading Royals and Rugby’s Young took on a fast-paced karate themed routine which earnt them a total of 159.1315 after an unfortunate basemark on their final element lowered their difficulty score.

They scored 59.8200 for artistic impression and 99.3115 for execution to place tenth in a competition which featured a number of senior athletes – including some that have qualified for the Olympics in Paris this summer.

Promising display

Less than 24 hours later they were back in the pool for the Free Duet final where they improved their ranking to eighth.

Their routine to Elvis Presley’s “A whole lot-ta shakin’ goin’ on” scored a total of 155.5429 that saw them finish just ahead of Italy in the standings.

It was a promising display from the pair who started off incredibly strongly and had a higher overall difficulty mark than a number of pairs around them.

Broken down they were awarded 31.2500 for difficulty, 54.7200 for artistic impression and an execution score of 100.8229.

The competition in China will have undoubtedly given the duo a huge boost after achieving the latest milestone in their young careers.

The Olympic bound duet of Kate Shortman and Isabelle Thorpe are set to return to action in the second leg of the Artistic Swimming World Cup in the French capital at the start of May as their preparations for Paris 2024 continues. The world cup then heads to Markham (Canada) – 31 May to 2 June – before the Super Final in Budapest (Hungary) from 5-7 July.

Meanwhile the GB team and mixed duet are continuing their training as they target the European Championships in June.

You can watch back the action from the opening leg of the Artistic Swimming World Cup for free on Eurovision Sport and you can find all the results from the competition here.