Kate Shortman and Izzy Thorpe won Great Britain's first artistic swimming medal in Olympic history when they secured silver in the duet in Paris on Saturday.
They had been in the gold medal position after performing their Rising Phoenix routine to score 294.5085 for a combined total of 558.5367. They had ranked fourth with a score of 264.0282 following their technical routine on Friday.
China's Wang Liuyi and Wang Qianyi pipped them to top spot with the final free routine of the competition, while Netherlands' Bregje and Noortje de Brouwer took bronze. Four of the five pairs who finished in the top five were twins, with Shortman and Thorpe being the only exception.
The British pair are the second generation of Shortman-Thorpe duets. In the 1980s, Shortman's mother Maria swam with Karen Thorpe (Izzy's mother) who is Swim England's head of performance for artistic swimming.
"It honestly is like a dream, I can't believe it," Shortman said. "We have worked so hard to get here, I didn't want to cry but I am. There's so many people to thank, thank you obviously to Izzy because we've been through some really hard times trying to get here and it just makes me emotional that it was all worth it.
"We just hope we can inspire young girls and boys to join the sport. It's always been of our goal to expand the sport, it's so fun, it's so dynamic and obviously it's a creative sport so we just hope that this has inspired people and hopefully young athletes will be inspired as well."
Britain's previous best showing in synchronised artistic swimming was the fourth place achieved by Caroline Holmyard and Carolyn Wilson in Los Angeles in 1984.
Shortman and Thorpe, who are two-time World Championship medallists, appeared shocked when the realisation dawned that they were leading the table and they cried tears of joy when it was confirmed they had secured silver.
"After Tokyo both of us were unsure if we were going to carry on in the sport. We didn't know what the future looked like for us because we were getting the same results all the time, we were getting 14th in Tokyo and we weren't progressing from there," Thorpe said.
"It was really disheartening. I'm so glad we carried on. We were in a really low point in both our careers when we both thought we were gonna stop but I'm so happy we carried on and we had each other the whole way and we pushed through."