World Aquatics Championships 2024: Wang twins narrowly earn artistic swimming women's duet free title
The People's Republic of China's Wang Liuyi and Wang Qianyi added to their duet technical gold medal, but did so by barely 0.28 points.
Wang Liuyi and Wang Qianyi regained their women's duet free artistic swimming world title at the World Aquatics Championships Doha 2024 on Thursday (8 February), but by less than three-tenths of a point.
The 2022 world champions had already secured gold in the duet technical event on Monday, but they were pushed close in Thursday afternoon's free final.
Despite increasing the degree of difficulty of their routine from Wednesday's preliminaries, their execution was judged to be less clean by the judges, as they received a total score of 250.7729, one of only two teams to lose points in the final compared to their preliminary score (which had been 250.8438).
The twin sisters ended up not even 0.28 points clear of another set of twins, with the Netherlands' Bregje and Noortje de Brouwer winning silver on 250.4979. The de Brouwer sisters had finished fourth in the duet technical final, but in the free final added six points to their preliminary score to take a career-best World Championships silver, having never previously finished on the podium at Worlds.
Great Britain's Kate Shortman and Izzy Thorpe took home bronze (247.2626) to add to their duet technical silver. They were the most-improved team from Wednesday's preliminaries, adding over 10 points to their prelim score. The Brits have only won three artistic swimming medals in history, with Shortman having played a part in all three, with a bronze in the solo free in 2023 to go with her two this year.
The event was a Paris 2024 Olympic Games qualifier, with quota spots obtained by the top three duets not yet qualified. The final list of qualified duets is pending, as any NOCs that qualify in the team event will also qualify for the duet event, and the team free final is on Friday.