LONDON — One team wore bathing suits decorated with a picture of what appeared to be an owl dressed in a tuxedo. Another began its routine with the athletes lying, inert, by the side of the pool. And in an homage to the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, a third team, the synchronized swimming duet from Italy, tried to imagine how it might look to descend into madness while performing intricate leg maneuvers upside down in an Olympic swimming pool.


“We imagine there is a mirror, and she is getting ready, and then she goes crazy,” said Giulia Lapi, one of the Italian twosome, said of the artist. “She had a serious accident and she was covered in plaster and had to paint using a mirror.”


Kahlo was not the only one going crazy in the Aquatics Centre this week during the duet part of one of the more peculiar sports on the Olympic menu, the synchronized swimming competition. (The more familiar team competition, which involves eight swimmers at a time, comes Thursday.)


Twelve teams made the final round, but the Russians dominated from the start. Made up to look like sinister adult-size dolls with exaggerated painted-on eyelashes, they won the final on Tuesday with an intricately scary routine — all staccato kicks and aggressive slashing arm movements — set to the theme song from the 1977 horror film “Suspiria,” in which a young dancer realizes that her ballet school is being controlled by witches and that there is no escape.


The Spanish duet, the minuteness of whose bathing suits made them a favorite with the spectators, came in second.


Even when you have seen it on television, it is hard to appreciate the full experience of live synchronized swimming. For one thing, the swimmers do everything synchronistically, including walking to the edge of the pool, which they do in an oddly exaggerated way, like mimes in bathing suits. Then, when they get there, they affix their nose plugs and perform short dance routines — this is called deck work — that generally end in a kind of unexpected tableau vivant, with them posing together in an artistic flourish.


Then they get in the water, whereupon their heads disappear for long periods of time and all you can see are legs — whose legs they are is not always clear — bending and straightening and crossing and recrossing in bewildering fast configurations. Their heads are pointing directly toward the bottom of the pool, so their bodies are vertical, controlled by their arms.


The sport requires the athletes to stop breathing for long periods of time, and they sometimes pass out.


“It’s like running a sprint for three and a half minutes while periodically holding your breath,” said Mariya Koroleva, who, with Mary Killman, competed for the United States. “It gets pretty scary. Your mind and body get completely numb, and you lose the ability to think because, basically, you don’t have enough oxygen.”


In a hopeful move that seemed designed to appeal to the TV audience back home, Koroleva and Killman performed in the final to a medley of songs beginning with “Olympic Fanfare,” which John Williams composed for NBC during the Los Angeles Olympics. Their bathing suits had pictures of Olympic torches and Olympic rings on them.


Just as the narrative the Americans expressed with their routine seemed to be “We win the Olympics,” (they did not, alas; they came in 11th), so did many of their competitors’ routines follow particular themes.


The British pair, for instance, wanted to suggest “the ravens in the Tower of London,” said Jenna Randall of Britain. “You know, things like hunting its prey, flying, playing around.”


In keeping with her team’s Sherlock Holmes theme, Aigerim Zhexembinova of Kazakhstan explained, “we pretended to make pistols with our hands.”


Some routines depicted epic struggle between opposing forces and involved the athletes (gracefully) wrestling, for lack of a better word, with each other, in an endless battle for supremacy that made it look as if they were trying to drown each other. The French went with “Swan Lake” and the traditional duality-of-nature struggle, while the Czechs decided “to show the fight between the classical and modern styles of music,” said Sona Bernardova, a Czech swimmer.


The music was as idiosyncratic as everything else. The Australians’ song was called “Spanish”; the Spaniards’ song was composed by someone from Argentina. The Russians, wearing suits decorated with silhouettes of Michael Jackson, performed their technical routine to the Jackson song “They Don’t Care About Us.”


The Brazil duet also matched costume to music. Performing to a piece called “The Human Body,” by Arnaldo Antunes, they wore suits that appeared at first to be decorated with pretty red patterns but on closer inspection turned out to be spangled depictions of the human circulatory system (there were bones on the back).