The preliminary Solo and Combination competition on Day 2 of the 11th FINA World Junior Synchronised Swimming Championships in Saint Petersburg (RUS) from July 9-13, showed the superiority of Russian synchronised swimming over every other nation. Anna Udovik got 95.000 for her free routine while Ona Carbonell (ESP) got the second position with 92.800. The third-place result was earned by Chen Xiaojin of China (91.700).
The degree of difficulty in modern synchronised swimming is so high, even at a junior level it is a big problem to show something original in one’s routine. In Solo, one of the most remarkable compositions was given by the Canadian Chloe Isaak – a student of the famous coach Julie Sauve, whom, in the early 90’s worked with the gold medallist of 1991 Worlds and 1992 Olympics, Sylvie Frechette.

The young swimmer from Montreal delivered a nice program; very impressive artistically and very complicated technically. The choice of music was also unusual. All this made the performance quite unique and absolutely different from the other competitors. Chloe Isaak got 5th position and her score (91.100) was pretty close to the leaders.

In Combination, Russia held the leadership again. Their superiority was evident (about three points) but the head coach of the Russian team, Natalya Mendygalieva, mentioned that there were serious mistakes in the acrobatic lifts. “We’ll try to do our best in the final”, she added.

Spain presented a very old routine that has existed for several years already. The Combination team of China also repeated the old program they used for the previous Junior Worlds. Both routines however, were interesting, with clean lines, high acrobatic jumps and beautiful lifts.

Mendygalieva also mentioned very unusual composition of the Ukrainian team, with performed to the famous music of “Swan Lake”. “It is very creative,” she said. “There is a space for us to learn”.

The media interest in the competition is quite high even during the preliminaries. There are 7 TV channels following the Championships from the very first day and a big number of newspapers and magazines as well.