Ruthless Russians complete clean sweep of synchro medals

Four events, four gold medals. The 10-strong team duly collected the final one in the free combination at the Baku Aquatics Centre on Tuesday evening.

Just like the teams event on Monday, they saved their best performance for when it counted, scoring 90.2333 to leave their rivals dots in the distance.

Russians Daria Kulagina, Valeriya Filenkova and solo star Anisiya Neborako will leave the Baku 2015 European Games with three gold medals each.

Asked how they did it, Filenkova was concise. "Practice, practice, working hard and that's it. No secrets."

Spain and Ukraine were left to battle it out for second and third, as they did in the team's free routine event.

The Spaniards performed to an Elvis Presley medley that was never going to leave Russia all shook up.

But it had the desired effect on Ukraine, who performed to music from the James Bond movie Skyfall and scored 86.8667 points, a marginal improvement on their preliminary round score.

Spain, who were three points better than Ukraine in the preliminary round, were last in the pool and upped their performance significantly to score 87.7333 points.

 

(baku2015.com)