If you watch the U.S. Artistic Swimming Team as they train for the Olympics, watching the swimmers flip upside down and fold their legs in mid-air with the perfect timing of a madly spinning offshore wind turbine, you'll notice two things.
First, the sport is a lot tougher and probably a lot crazier than you might think, and second, as reflected in its pre-2017 name “synchronized swimming,” it's a sport steeped in a quest for uniformity, where not one swimmer in the pool is going to be like any other.
His name is Bill May, and he's the only man on the team. Rule changes for 2022 allow men to compete in Paris this summer, meaning May's first, and realistically last, chance to achieve a lifelong dream of competing in the Olympics. He's 45 years old.
Of the 12-person team, only eight will make the trip to Paris, plus one alternate — a tough reality for such a tight-knit group. The team will announce the finalists on Saturday.
May is a great figure in the sport, breaking down barriers for more than three decades and leading a decades-long effort to include men in Olympic competition, but his fate this summer will depend not on personal achievement or celebrity as an advocate but on whether he can perform as one-eighth of a women's team half his age.
The looming decision weighs heavily on the team, with head coach Andrea Fuentes saying the anxiety is keeping her from sleeping.
“I grew up a fan of Bill's and we all know he's a pioneer in the sport,” she said, “and he's a great person, not just a great swimmer. But you have to do what's best for the team.”
May is used to answering questions about the weight of this moment, and he's careful to maintain an air of gratitude and humility. “I'm insecure about myself,” he said recently during a break from an eight-hour practice at Park Pool on the UCLA campus. “But I've been in this sport for 35 years, and I'm proud and grateful for all that this sport has given me.”
Top athletes in flashy swimsuits
Synchronized swimming, a mix of ballet, gymnastics, swimming and Esther Williams' underwater spectacle, debuted in the Olympics in 1984. The flashy swimsuits, over-the-top (waterproof) makeup, dramatic music and zany theatricality may evoke Busby Berkeley extravaganzas, but artistic swimmers are exceptional athletes, combining the cardiovascular fitness of a sprinter with the flexibility of a gymnast.
Athletes spend most of the time upside down, holding their breath and paddling their arms rapidly to stay afloat in the water. They are not allowed to touch the bottom of the pool, and their vision underwater is blurred (goggles are prohibited in competitions). And because the routines are so precise and so compact in composition, even the slightest mistake can lead to a nasty crash or a kick to the head. It is not uncommon for athletes to suffer concussions or even lose consciousness from the intensity. In 2022, American artistic swimmer Anita Alvarez lost consciousness and sank to the bottom of the pool after performing a solo routine at the World Aquatics Championships. Coach Fuentes dived in fully clothed and pulled her safely to the surface.
The seriousness of the event was on full display last Monday, when the swimmers gathered at 6:30 a.m. and did a series of intense stretches on land, culminating in the splits for more than a minute each. Afterwards, they slathered their faces with zinc-oxide diaper cream to protect them from the California sun, changed into their swimsuits — one-pieces for the women, a tiny Speedo for May — and plunged into 16-foot-deep water.
Aside from a 30-minute break in a makeshift hot tub, the swimmers would spend most of the next 7 1/2 hours in the pool, each with their own little corner, while the rest of the space was taken up by lap swimmers and, for a time, members of the UCLA women's swimming team.
Fuentes blasted the soundtrack to their routine, a mosaic of music and words with a water theme, and painstakingly coached them through each element. As they performed the moves, she recorded them on an iPad, and then the athletes would tread water with “whisk” leg movements, watch replays for instructions, and do the whole thing again. It was rigorous and exhausting work.
Except for brief bathroom breaks, May never got out of the water, held on to the edge of the pool, or stood on anything to rest during the first five hours. During breaks, she would paddle around in the water and joke with her teammates. May was always the first to arrive and the last to leave, and she did her daily sit-ups, ran laps after practice, and had a special stretching ritual twice a day.
“His health is in a league of its own,” says team coach Lara Teixeira. “He's a very driven guy, and he can accomplish anything he puts his mind to.” At 45, recovery becomes more difficult and the risk of injury increases, she says. “He takes full control of his health,” she says. “In a way, he really is his own coach.”
Joining the Syracuse SynchroCats
May's story is so unusual that it's impossible to see him as anything other than an outlier, someone ahead of his time. He grew up in Syracuse, New York, to a mother who was a teacher and a father who worked as a typesetter and security guard. As a boy, he was a competitive gymnast and swimmer, and at age 10, he tagged along to his sister's artistic swimming class and fell in love with it.
“People often ask me, 'Why did you choose artistic swimming?'” May said. “I didn't choose it. Artistic swimming was waiting for me. Artistic swimming chose me.”
His obsessions were very natural and his parents were very supportive, so May didn't think much about how different he was from other people.
“I didn't feel like I had to look a certain way,” he says, “I just knew I loved the sport.” At 14, the family of a girl he beat in an individual match booed him, but his gender was hardly an issue. “They treated me like any other athlete,” he says.
He swam for several teams upstate, including the Syracuse Synchro Cats and the Oswego Lakets, but his coach told him he had nothing more to teach. At age 16, May moved to California to train under the best coach in the country, Chris Carver of the Santa Clara AquaMaze.
Sending her teenage son to California was a tough decision for his mother, Sharon May. “I felt like I would lose him emotionally if I didn't let him go,” she said. “This was a golden opportunity for him, and how would he feel if he had a mother who wouldn't let him have that? But on the inside, I was heartbroken.”
Carver liked May right away — and everyone likes May — and was impressed by how self-motivated he was and how enthusiastic he remained no matter what. “I knew he was going to be great,” she says. “First of all, he's unusual for a man in that he's very flexible. And he's got great legs and he's strong, but he's also incredibly driven and wants to improve himself. He's very humble, very receptive to criticism and critique, and very easy to work with.”
As his fame grew, May competed and won nationally, but top international competitions remained closed to men. After training with the U.S. Olympic team in 2004 and cheering from the sidelines during the Athens competition, May retired from the sport at age 25 and moved to Las Vegas. For the next 17 years, he starred in Cirque du Soleil's underwater spectacle “O,” but continued to advocate for men and be an ambassador for artistic swimming.
Then in 2014, news broke that men would be allowed to compete in mixed duets, like in figure skating, at the World Championships the following year. May came out of retirement to compete and won two medals with two different partners and two different routines: a gold medal in the technical competition with Christina Jones and a silver medal in the free skating competition with Christina Lamb Underwood.
Many more World Championship medals followed. A few years ago, May left Cirque du Soleil to become head coach of AquaMaze, now called Santa Clara Artistic Swimming. But the Holy Grail, the Olympics, remains elusive. The 2016 and 2020 Olympics have taken place, but men have yet to compete. It's only thanks to May's long and passionate campaign that men will be allowed to compete in 2024.
A regular athlete — but older
You have to be a little crazy to love a sport that offers little prestige or reward. Some players on the U.S. team make less than $2,000 a month. May loves it with all his heart and soul. The letters on his license plate read OCWAMAN, a homage to the Oswego County Water Department in Syracuse, a homage he says he seized on by chance as a homonym because “AQUAMAN was already taken.”
No one sees May as at a disadvantage. Although May has competed and won many international duet competitions outside the Olympics, this is the first time she has competed with a larger team in 20 years. The sport has become more technically challenging and the judging tougher.
He's an older athlete, 28 years older than the team's youngest, Audrey Kwon, who is 17. Assistant coach Megan Abarca has known him for 20 years, since he was 10 and May was 19. she The coach's teammate, Natalia Vega, 25, was such a huge fan of May's as a teenager that she once removed the face of May's duet partner from a poster, replaced it with a photo of herself, and sent it to May with a note: “Can I be your duet partner?” (The two later teamed up and placed fourth in the mixed duet at the 2019 World Championships.)
May, who was selected for the U.S. national team a year ago when men were allowed to participate, brought maturity, discipline and an endlessly cheerful personality. When he's in a pool full of swimmers wearing nose plugs and goggles doing the same practices all day, six days a week, he seems like just another athlete, his teammates say.
There are obvious differences — for example, everyone walks into the same locker room after practice except for May — and, of course, he grew up a generation ahead of his teammates.
“I never feel old, except when I talk about movies, music, old food, sweets,” he says. When he mentioned “The Breakfast Club,” no one knew what he was talking about. “No one has probably ever seen a phone booth,” he says.
Being male isn't necessarily an advantage in artistic swimming, which requires endurance as well as flexibility, but men have helped evolve the sport in exciting directions with complementary skills that enhance athleticism and power, said Lisa Schott, chair of technical and artistic swimming at World Aquatics, the sport's governing body.
Schott, who called May an “icon and role model,” dreams of a time when men and women compete regularly in teams. Equality works both ways, she said: “World Aquatics is committed to gender inclusivity and we want and welcome men to participate.”
“That would be devastating.”
Ironically, May appears to be the only male artistic swimmer remaining (or swimming) on ​​the Olympic team. Most countries currently have no swimmers anywhere near May's caliber in team competitions. The world's top male mixed duet artistic swimmer, Italy's Giorgio Minisini (28), was recently turned down for the Italian Olympic team.
“It would be devastating not to make the Olympic team. Maybe I could have done something differently, maybe I could have tried harder,” May said.
“But even more than that, my biggest fear is not seeing men in the Olympics,” he added. “It's like a slap in the face when you finally have an opportunity to have men in the Olympics and know that the sport is finally becoming inclusive and then not seeing that representation.”
Schott said May had already transformed the sport by launching a new generation of athletes such as America's Kenny Gaudette and Britain's Lanjuo Tomblin.
“As the sport evolves and people get faster, stronger and more athletic, we will see mixed teams,” she said. “The only question is, what kind of teams will we see at this Olympics?”