Artistic Swimming Now Makes You Declare What You Are About to Do

The sport moved from three components to two

Under the old system, a routine was scored on execution, artistic impression and difficulty — three panels, three judgements, added together.

The other pool sport with declared difficulty handles it differently — see diving’s scoring rules.

Since 2023 there are two: elements and artistic impression.

Difficulty did not disappear. It moved inside the elements score, and it stopped being something judges assess in the moment.

Because now you declare it in advance

The mechanism is the coach card.

Before a routine, the team submits a declaration listing every element it intends to perform and the Degree of Difficulty of each. Routines contain a set number of elements, drawn from required technical elements, free hybrids and acrobatics.

A technical controller — who may review video — then checks whether each element was actually performed as declared.

That is the whole reform in one sentence. The sport stopped asking judges how difficult was that? and started asking did they do what they said they would?

Those are enormously different questions. The first is an opinion formed at speed while watching eight swimmers move partly underwater. The second is verification, against a written claim, with video.

The base mark is the enforcement

If an element was not performed as declared, a base mark applies: the element’s difficulty drops to 0, 0.1 or 0.5, depending on what kind of element it was.

Notice what that does. It does not deduct points for a poor performance — the execution component handles quality. It removes the credit for the difficulty you claimed but did not deliver.

A team that declares an extremely hard hybrid and performs a slightly easier version does not get a slightly lower score. It can get close to nothing for that element.

The asymmetry is deliberate and severe. Under the old system, over-ambition was cheap — attempt the hard thing, and if it went imperfectly the judges would still credit some of the difficulty they saw. Now the declaration is a commitment, and missing it is catastrophic.

Which makes routine construction a risk calculation

The strategic effect is the interesting part.

Coaches now build routines the way a diver or a gymnast selects a programme: choosing between a higher declared difficulty with base-mark risk and a safer declaration executed cleanly.

A team that reliably delivers moderate difficulty can beat a more talented team that declared beyond itself. That is a genuine change in what the sport rewards — from spectacle attempted to difficulty guaranteed.

Compare gymnastics’ code of points, where the same structure — declared start value, deductions against it — has shaped routine construction for decades, and produced the same debate about whether it makes the sport safer or merely more calculated.

Why artistic swimming needed this more than most

Every judged sport worries about subjectivity. Artistic swimming had a particular version of it.

Much of the difficulty in a routine happens underwater and out of sight, judged from surface evidence — how high a lift went, how stable the position looked, how long the swimmers stayed under. A judge is inferring difficulty from its symptoms.

Worse, the sport had a long-standing reputation problem: the same nations winning, scores that appeared to track reputation, and no mechanism by which an outsider could demonstrate that a routine was objectively harder.

A declared-difficulty system fixes exactly that. A team from a federation with no history can put a number on the card and, if the technical controller confirms it was performed, that number counts — regardless of what anyone expected.

That is the strongest argument for the reform, and it applies well beyond artistic swimming. See figure skating’s post-scandal rebuild, which reached the same conclusion by the same route.

What it cost

Two things, and neither is trivial.

Legibility. The old system produced a score a viewer could roughly follow. The new one requires knowing what was on the card, and a routine that looked spectacular can score badly for reasons invisible from the stands.

Artistry. The component still exists, but it now sits alongside a rigorously verified difficulty score — and when one half of a system is precise and the other is not, the precise half tends to dominate what teams optimise for.

That is the standing complaint about every code-of-points reform: sports adopt them to stop judges deciding results, and end up with routines built for the table rather than for the audience.

Artistic swimming has decided that being defensible matters more than being immediately readable. Given its history, that is a reasonable order of priorities.

For the sport’s pool-based sibling, see swimming rules, and for a judged sport that refused this trade entirely, snowboard judging.