Britain's synchronised swimming duet of Jenna Randall and Olivia Allison are set to take on some of the world's best nations at the Rome Open this weekend.
Competition begins on Friday (29 May) and the duet, who recently qualified for the Olympics, will be taking on the likes of Spain and Italy as they continue their preparation for the Beijing Games in August.
The British athletes are now in the middle of a solid block of training and the event will provide an excellent platform to improve their competition experience before the Olympics.
For National Performance Director Biz Price the competition will allow her to analyse what final changes need to be made before the girls compete on the biggest stage of their careers.
"I have made the last big changes to the routines before the Olympics and I will be very interested by the judges feedback," Price said. "I want to know if I have taken the routines up to the next level. My changes are quite hard and challenging for the girls so it will be interesting to see how they react to them in a competition environment.
"We are in the middle of a heavy training phase so the girls are quite fatigued so it will be good to see if the girls can pick themselves up to put in a good performance here.
"Many of our closest competitors' like Mexico and Kazakhstan are here so if we could go above them with our improved routines that would be very satisfying."
Beijing will be the first Olympics that Allison and Randall will have competed at and Price has been working through their training to prepare them both technically and physically for the challenges they will face.
"I have upped the amount of training the girls are doing," Price added. "In order to be able to perform my changes they needed to have a better level of fitness. The girls had a break after the Olympic qualifiers but have now been back into hard physical training for the past two weeks.
"I needed to make their training more challenging for them so they would be able to handle the next level. It has been hard on them but I know we are right on course for the Olympics."
