Evangelia Plataniotis heard a lot about her behavior three years ago in Tokyo, but she is preparing for Paris with gold and silver in her luggage
H Evangelia Plataniotis returns from Qatar with gold and silver in her luggage, she is unquestionably one of the world’s top solo artistic swimmers, but she has seen the Eiffel Tower dimly all week, swaying like a mirage of the desert on the distant horizon. Following groundbreaking changes to the sport’s regulations, individual events will no longer exist at the Olympics. Platanioti may have been crowned world champion time and time again, but it was impossible to find her way to Paris without help from her fellow athletes. After the intrigues of 2021 in Tokyo nothing seemed obvious at the start of the 2024 World Championship.
The Tokyo serial
You may remember the serial from three years ago. Greece’s leading artistic swimmer was in danger of missing the Tokyo Games after testing positive for Covid-19 shortly before departure. She finally managed to recover, got on the plane to Japan on the eve of her match and competed in the doubles alongside Evelina Papazoglou, amid shouts and whispers.
When a case of coronavirus was detected in the mission, the gymnasts were locked in quarantine rooms in Tokyo and the Greek artistic ensemble was withdrawn from the team, while the leading dancer herself tested positive again before returning to Greece. It was never ascertained who was the girl who… sowed the germ due to irresponsibility, as some blamed the unvaccinated companion Despina Karabela and others Plataniotis herself.
Aiolos’ case was opened a year later by a publication on the SDNA website, according to which Platanioti had attacked her fellow athlete Maria Alzigouzi-Komineas in the Olympic village of Tokyo (a related complaint had also reached Documento). The swimming federation declined to comment on the report, but it appears to have tacitly punished Plataniotis with a six-month ban from any event after the Tokyo Games. The sentence, if any, was never announced.
Officially, Platanioti was then going through a period of rest and reconstruction, while she later declared that she had been psychologically affected by what happened during the pandemic and was thinking of giving up: “I had reached my limits”. The Tokyo incident was forgotten and the storm passed, since the glow of the two medals that Platanioti brought from the 2022 World Championships in Budapest was enough to banish the shadows.
“Bad comments have been written about me regarding my character and morals,” Platanioti said on a television show. “When you are good they will try to hurt you. What was written about me, that I knocked a fellow athlete to the wood, is not true. The article was sued, I called my lawyer. There were witnesses to the incident.”
2023 was a year without a medal, with many protests about “injustices” and finally without a smile for Plataniotis, since the individual events left her in fourth and fifth place in the World Championships. “My preparation was incomplete,
After the solo was removed from the Olympic program, the sixth place she won in the duet with partner Sofia Malkogeorgou was the passport to the Paris Games. I went to Fukuoka with a month of work, so it would be a miracle if I won medals,” she said. “Since last September, we have set our sights on Doha, with the aim of giving my best in this event.”
From the window
And indeed the 29-year-old Greek won the top of the world not once, but twice: gold in the technical program with 272.9633 points, silver in the freestyle behind the Canadian Jacqueline Simono (but ahead of the Greek-Austrian former world champion Vassiliki Alexandri) with 253.2833. The “Black Crow” was the sound background in her first triumph, the most Greek “Zorbas” in the second. Tears of joy and vindication followed, of course. “My girl never gave up, even though she went through difficult situations,” boasted Michalis’ father back in Athens.
The two medals in the individual events were Plataniotis’ first goal in dry Qatar, but not necessarily her biggest. The removal of the solo from the Olympic program left her meteoric in view of Paris, since after the ignominious disqualification of the team from the Doha final, the only window was the distinction in the duet, now partnered by Sofia Malkogeorgou.
The two girls had no realistic chance of a medal, but their flawless performance in Thursday’s final, where they scored 236.7834 to finish sixth, brought the desired placing to clinch the coveted ticket. The solo world champion will normally board the flight to Paris, even if from the last minute window, if only for an event with little hope of distinction.
In fact, it will be the seventh Olympiad in a row with Greek representation in the duet of synchronized swimming, starting with the years of Christina Thalassinidou (2000). For Plataniotis, who will celebrate her 30th birthday on August 9 in the city of light, this will be her fourth consecutive participation in the Olympic Games.
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