Swimming with Style, Grace for Seven Decades

At age 77, Nancy Weiman, M.A.’86, still glides through water with the strength of a speed swimmer and the grace of a dancer—all with a smile, pointed toes and sometimes holding her breath upside down. 

As an internationally competitive artistic swimmer, Weiman also must spin, kick and sway in precise formation with up to nine teammates. Having had both hips and one knee replaced, she can no longer spring from the water as high as she once did. Moreover, the underwater “eggbeater kicks” that keep her afloat—swimmers lose points for touching the pool floor—can be exhausting. 

So she works that much harder to make it look easy. 

“It’s a difficult sport because, of course, everything you’re doing is to make it seem not difficult,” Weiman explained recently from her home in Accokeek, Md., about 20 miles outside Washington, D.C.  

With four months until the 2026 Masters Championship in Charlotte, N.C., in October, Weiman is once again going for gold. Her twice-daily training sessions start with a one-mile swim. 

For 68 years, Weiman has competed across the world while growing her sport. In 1975, she helped create the Masters division for swimmers 21 and older. She later teamed up with her then-Soviet counterparts to support making synchronized swimming an Olympic sport in 1984. In 2006, she was inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame. Two years ago, her “trailblazing, prolific” career was highlighted in a tribute memorialized in the Congressional Record. (The sport officially changed its name to “artistic swimming” in 2017, but Weiman still prefers the shorthand “synchro.”) 

Competing over seven decades has not only kept Weiman in top shape but also plays into her lifelong love of learning. With a full-time job and young son, she enrolled in GW’s Exercise Science Program, where she studied how corporate exercise programs could improve employees’ health, boost productivity and reduce medical costs. Her graduate studies, she said, helped her “bring broader thinking” to her career managing public pools and other athletic facilities in suburban Maryland.  

She appreciated how GW “put students first,” particularly by offering evening classes.“That flexibility was key,” Weiman said. “It allowed me to continue my career and be a mother.” 

Born Nancy Hunt in St. Paul, Minn., Weiman learned to swim as a preschooler, when her mother taught her the basics in the lake where their family had a summer cabin. She couldn’t get enough. 

While a coach eventually told her she had the talent to become an Olympic speed swimmer, she said, “Just going up and down a pool didn't do it for me.” 

She had, however, enjoyed taking ballet lessons and watching figure skating. At age 9, her two best friends, twin neighbor girls, invited her to join the YWCA’s Merry Mermaids “water ballet” group. Swimming to music felt like figure skating in water, she said. 

She competed in local and national meets through high school and soon set her sights on working with a preeminent U.S. coach, most of whom were then in California. 

In 1969, toward the end of Weiman’s junior year at the University of Minnesota, the coach of the highly competitive San Francisco Merionettes recruited her. She ended up spending four years with the Merionettes, learning from national champions as she gradually moved up to the elite A team. They practiced six and a half days a week, with one evening off. 

Being at the top of the sport had its perks. In 1975, Weiman and her fellow Merionettes appeared in the movie Funny Lady, performing in a swimming pool scene with actress Barbra Streisand. (Weiman still receives small residual checks from Columbia Pictures.) 

To support herself, Weiman continued working as a bank teller. She also kept her promise to her parents, completing her undergraduate degree in physical education at San Francisco State University. 

Her bank teller job brought her to David Weiman, who visited her window daily to make deposits and get change for his father’s pharmacy. One day he asked, “Can I drive you to the pool?” 

After marrying and moving to D.C. for David’s job as a lobbyist, Weiman started what would become a 40-year career managing athletic facilities.

Though she also officially retired from artistic swimming, she quickly realized she wanted to keep her “toes in the water”—without the grueling training regimen of a full-time competitor.

Knowing other retired swimmers still interested in competing, Weiman helped create the Masters program as part of U.S. Artistic Swimming, the sport’s governing body. Her work included helping to write the rules of competition that, while updated over the years, are still used today.

Shortly after, Weiman formed the DC Synchromasters, a team of D.C.-area women in their 20s to 70s who still compete in national and international Masters meets. Weiman now trains mostly on her own and with the California-based Redwood Empire Synchro, which she also competes with.

Along the way, she has won more than 110 medals for team, duet and solo events, including while seven months pregnant with her son, Aaron, now a jazz pianist in San Francisco. (Five weeks after his birth, she medalled in a solo event.)

But the medal count is 20 years out of date. That’s because Weiman only added them up in 2006 at the request of a teammate who nominated her to the Hall of Fame. She said she hasn’t tallied them since, even as she continues to routinely medal at national and world championships for her age group.

While she loves to win, she said, “I don’t need to count medals.”

David Weiman said his wife has always been loath to promote herself or tout her influence in growing her sport.

“She doesn't feel the need to do the ‘Look at me!’” he said.

Carole Mitchell, who has known Weiman for nearly 30 years as a former artistic swimmer, judge and U.S. Artistic Swimming official, called her a “pioneer.” Because of Weiman, Mitchell said, countless swimmers have been able to compete throughout their lives or discover the sport well into adulthood.

She noted Weiman’s extraordinarily fluid style, the way the water rarely ripples around her.

“There are some people that when they're in the water, you just can't look away,” said Mitchell, who lives in Richmond, Va. “She’s one of those people…She swims with an ease that makes you think, ‘Oh, that's easy. I could do that.’ But there's no way on God's green earth you could do that.”

While Weiman relishes competing, she now focuses on having fun—with artistic swimming friends from across the world, including some she’s known for more than a half-century. Only when asked will she offer advice for older athletes contemplating competition.

“Follow the Nike slogan,” Weiman said. “Just do it.”