Doha, Qatar, February 8, 2024: Chinese twins Wang Liuyi and Wang Qianyi completed a golden grand slam in artistic swimming at the World Aquatics Championships – Doha 2024 on Thursday.
Performing last of the 12 pairs, the 27-year-old sisters overtook the pack and added the women’s duet free world title to women’s duet technical and team acrobatic and team technical honours.
The Wangs received 250.7729 points comprised of 92.7500 for artistic impression and 158.0229 for execution.
Bregje de Brouwer and Noortje de Brouwer of the Netherlands had to settle for silver with 250.4979 points, just 0.2750 points behind the Chinese champions, and Great Britain’s Kate Shortman and Isabelle Thorpe were third for bronze with 247.2626.
Wang Liuyi said: “I feel so excited and appreciate to have four gold medals. This is based on our hard training every day. Our team is a great team so they inspire us to show our best version.”
When asked which of the four gold medals was the most difficult and special, Qianyi replied: “Today – because we just won by 0.275. Very, very difficult, I think.
“We wanted to show more the artistic impression so the difficulty is not really higher than the other teams. But this is our aim in this competition. We wanted to show our artistic impression to the judges.”
Now their competitions have finished, the sisters said they hoped to “hang out” tomorrow and maybe go shopping as well as supporting their Chinese teammates in the team free on Friday.
Lunar New Year, however, must wait. New Year’s Eve is on Friday night, ahead of the first day of the spring festival on February 10, but their schedule is not fixed so they don’t know when they will return home to China.
Qianyi said the family festivities would be put on hold but the plan was…“maybe just eating together and just staying together”.
This is the second time they have won four gold medals at a world championship, following Budapest in 2022, and Liuyi said: “This time I think the main goal is to show the great performance in every competition every time.”
As for their targets in the upcoming Lunar New Year of the Dragon, Liuyi said: “Every time I am asked about the goal it is the Paris Olympic Games. We want to show a great performance in the Olympic Games.”
Having just been shown a picture of the Paris medals, their determination and desire has just moved up another level.
