Sylvie Fréchette

Sylvie Fréchette is a Canadian former artistic swimmer, then called synchronized swimmer, who was born on 27 June 1967 in Montreal. She debuted at the world championships in 1986 with the Canadian team and won the solo world title in Perth in 1991. At the 1992 Barcelona Olympics a Brazilian judge pressed the wrong button and gave her a figures score of 8.7 instead of 9.7, which cost her the gold medal on the day; after the intervention of the Canadian IOC member Dick Pound the result was corrected and she received a gold medal in a ceremony in Montreal, while the American Kristen Babb-Sprague kept her medal too. She returned to competition in 1994, won a team silver at the 1996 Atlanta Games, and later designed the synchronized swimming sections of Cirque du Soleil shows.