Part I July 25, 2015 Kazan, Russia

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he Russian, pale and sour, ballet-walks heel-toe, heel-toe onto the pool deck in his bathing suit, which is designed to look like a communist-era military uniform. It consists of shorts, a real fold-down collar, actual epaulets and a black cross-body strap for ammunition. A woman, the Russian's partner, all nose and eyebrows in a lavender bathing suit decorated with appliqué flowers, prances out behind him tragically, and they embrace in this brightly lit arena in Kazan, at the first synchronized swimming world championship to include men. There is a TV camera here, and it projects the swimmers onto large screens for those in the cheap seats, and it immediately zooms in on the hammer and sickle insignia on the Russian's belt so that it seems to fill the arena. This elicits an eardrum-melting roar from the crowd, where a woman in the stands puts her hand to her face. A man nods heavily with memory. Did that judge just wipe away a tear? These are only the prelims in the mixed-gender technical duet event, but one day later during the finals, the audience, many of whom are here now, will react exactly the same way, as if their hearts are being broken anew for their tragic communist pasts.

Bill May, the United States' lone male synchronized swimmer, stands in the wings of the arena, a smile of teeth, teeth, teeth spread across his face. Bill May's smile is a wonder. When he leaves a room, its silhouette remains, like when you close your eyes after a camera flashes and all you can see is the bulb's yellow outline. He is still damp from his own routine, a red, white and blue warm-up suit covering his coral Speedo. If you didn't know Bill, you'd think this big smile, the one he wears as he watches his greatest competitors slow-motion-kill the home-team crowd dead, is his real smile.

But if you did know Bill, you'd know it isn't his real smile. How could it be? He is so close to losing the gold medal he was told he could never compete for, the medal he unretired for after a decade away from the sport. He dropped his whole life for seven months to train and travel to Russia and to stand atop the podium for what could be one final time, smiling his real smile, the one that spreads past the borders of his face so that it becomes the biggest thing about him. And here he is, different smile covering a lack of certainty he didn't acknowledge until maybe just now.

You could argue that Bill shouldn't be this nervous. Mixed-gender duets didn't officially exist even a year ago, so very few countries had a man ready to swim when synchro's governing body, Fédération Internationale de Natation (FINA), decided to allow male competitors at worlds. There are only six teams listed for the tech duet -- and the other five don't have Bill May. Everyone wants to win, yes, but this entire event is an audition of sorts too, and Bill knows that the fate of male synchronized swimming rests largely on his double-jointed shoulders. FINA brass are watching to see whether mixed-gender duets are compelling, whether people show up, whether they're not as much of a joke as everyone had assumed they'd be all these years. If FINA deems them Olympics-worthy, it will recommend that the International Olympic Committee consider including mixed-gender as an event. Which means the winners could be headed to Rio this summer, or more likely Tokyo in 2020. Which means Kazan could be Bill's big break -- Bill, a male synchronized swimmer, the male synchronized swimmer, could finally be in the Olympics. So what that it comes a full 10 years after he retired?

In his admirable and lonely career, Bill had won just about any competition that would have him. He stood damp and shiny on the podiums of the French Open, the Swiss Open, the Rome Open, the German Open, the U.S. nationals, gold medals gleaming from his chest, his smile (teeth, teeth, teeth) transmitting victory and stick-to-itiveness to all who watched. But Bill was always stopped short of the Olympic qualifiers, even as his female partners and the teams he trained with had medals placed around their necks. Synchro is a women's sport, but Bill was allowed to compete at many events because of the hassle it would have been to turn him away, because men can claim discrimination too, believe it or not. Yet despite that, he couldn't get into the qualifying events for the Olympics because he couldn't get into the Olympics because, well, synchro is a women's sport.

Bill remained poised and persuasive. He performed and charmed, and it almost worked. Everyone liked him. Even his detractors, even the people who excluded him or didn't speak up after they had promised to, even they tsk-tsked about what a shame it was when he retired in 2004 without a shot at worlds or the Olympics. But they are also quick to say, when the matter of discrimination comes up, that it wasn't that they were discriminating against men. Bill didn't represent throngs of boys fighting for equality; it was just him. You can't change an entire sport just for Bill, right?

Bill knows that the fate of male synchronized swimming rests largely on his double-jointed shoulders. - null

After 10 years away from synchro, Bill was doing fine. He had a speed-swimming team he trained with in Las Vegas, where he lived. He had two Weimaraners. He had people he loved in the Cirque du Soleil show he swam in two times each night. He had family. He was fine. He had learned to look at all he did as an accomplishment rather than a failure. He had learned to be proud to be a footnote to the sport, which is its own accomplishment, right? He was fine.

Then came Nov. 29, 2014, and Bill got word that FINA had voted to include two mixed-gender synchronized swimming events in the world championship. But word was that FINA had also started to worry about synchronized swimming losing traction at the Olympics. FINA figured some news, a rush of attention, might take synchro off the endangered list. Not to mention that the IOC president had recently called for the inclusion of more mixed-gender events.

Anyone else might have been bitter, being used and traded in FINA's attempt to save synchro after all these years of ignoring him. But Bill's answer? Who cares! He convinced and co-opted his former coach; recruited his (retired) former duet partner, an Olympian, for the free routine; and recruited a more recent (but still retired) Olympian for the technical. They set up schedules and pooled expenses and talked to their bosses about flexibility and their families about understanding. Then there they were, practicing for an event people never thought they'd live to see, doing it all because, what if it worked? They were adults with jobs and commitments. Yet each of them wondered: What if I could be a part of history? What if I could be the reason something changed?

Here in Kazan, the Russian cartwheels into the pool and his date flips in after him. The Russian is ostensibly going off to war, and his lady is desperately sad about it. But the storyline is hard to discern once they're in the pool because the technical duet (unlike the free duet to follow) is a set of predetermined elements in a predetermined order that every other team performs the exact same way, so there is little interplay between any two swimmers. Their music, a joyless Mikael Tariverdiev number misnamed "17 Moments of Spring," was edited so that it is randomly punctuated by the sounds of bombs falling and exploding -- not a great sound in an arena at an international sporting event, but by the second minute, you quit ducking for cover. At the end of the two minutes, they are both in a dead man's back float, and the crowd goes wild all over again, and Bill May's smile, which remember is not a real Bill May smile, becomes even less of a Bill May smile. This wasn't the plan. The plan was that Bill would do what he does, which is dazzle and win and beat the Russians. But this routine was so good (and in the Russians' home pool, no less) that it was hard to imagine even Bill topping it.

The music stops. The crowd stands. 2015 marks the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, and the Russians are sentimental about their communist past, no matter the sport.

It is common knowledge that judges score more strictly at the start of an event (and the Americans went second, the Russians last). It is common knowledge that there is a real home-court advantage to synchro (and we are in Kazan). It is common knowledge that Russians have been crushing Americans in synchro since the U.S. released its grip on the gold in 2000 (and remains baffled as to how to get the gold back). And it is common knowledge that once the Russians dominate a sport, they are unwilling to let go.

The Russians take it: 88.8539, a full 2.1431 points higher than the score of Bill and his partner, Christina Jones. Bill smiles as he leaves the arena, and he smiles on the shuttle back to the athletes village. Yes, it was only the prelims, but that Russian routine, hoo boy. Only once he is behind that closed door does Bill May, the great wet hope of synchronized swimming, let himself consider the possibility of his storybook career ending with a loss.

Spring 1994 Tonawanda, New York

It seemed like a trick. It was as if a video had been paused and the image in front of you was frozen. But, no, this was live. Bill was 15 years old, at the qualifying meet for the national age-group championship, when he dove into the water for his solo routine and stopped in an upside-down vertical position without his lower body being fully immersed in the water. That's right, take a moment, picture it: He dived into the water, and once partially under, once he was in up to the waist, Bill stopped his lower body from entering the pool -- he froze, he halted acceleration, he defied inertia. The audience also froze, in surprise and awe, because how do you do that? How do you dive in and just stop without your entire body getting wet? How was it possible to see Bill May, the top of his shiny metallic suit still poking out of the water, in suspended animation?

The routine went on, a music medley that included the themes from Exodus and Dances With Wolves, and Bill did a spin rotation, dropping his leg into a side crane. But at that point, who cared about the rest of the routine? Whose brain was not still processing the feat? The only person who had ever done it before was another swimmer, Patti Rischard, a native of Tonawanda, many years before. Bill had done it as a sort of tribute, he says now. But maybe he also did it to see whether he could. Maybe he also did it to prove that he could.

The meet ended, and the winners were called to the podium. Bronze mounted and got her medal. Applause. Silver, who had been gold the year before, mounted. Applause. Bill got up there -- strong and tall and disconcertingly male and beaming his Bill May smile -- and just as the top medal was being placed over his head, he and everyone else heard booing from the audience. It was Silver's father, furious with the righteous anger of a man whose daughter had been edged out by a boy in an all-female sport.

No one was quite like Bill May. His likability began in the water. He knew how to hold a crowd, which is something a synchronized swimmer must do out of necessity, since no matter who you are, you are small in a pool, and you are always partially submerged, and so you have to find ways to be big. Bill could flick his pointed foot for comical effect or roll his wrist for a dramatic one. He knew how to move his head to demonstrate longing or excitement. Gender aside (or maybe gender to the point), no one had the same strength and swiftness to battle the water without being overtaken by it, to propel himself out of the pool with force despite not being allowed to touch the bottom. Nobody just plain didn't tire out the way Bill just plain didn't tire out.

Bill didn't represent throngs of boys fighting for equality; it was just him. - null

Still, no matter how much the world of synchro liked him personally, and no matter how much his female competitors admired his love of their sport, Bill was barely tolerated. Someone -- he doesn't know who -- called Bill's house and told his mother he was a sicko and a pervert for insisting on spending all day with girls in their bathing suits. Bill and his coach, Chris Carver, considered litigation after some competitions wouldn't allow him in, but they didn't have the money. Bill's camp had been optimistic, but the others' optimism waned while Bill's still glowed with the painfully American idea that life could be fair, that you could work hard and want something and that just the working and the wanting could win over hearts, knock down barriers and cause change in even the most ossified institutions.

The people who cared most about Bill worried. Dee O'Hara, Bill's first synchro coach, feared that he had no future. "Just do swimming," she pleaded. Speed-swimming. Or diving. Or gymnastics. She'd never seen such a gifted athlete. She didn't understand why he'd waste this kind of talent on a sport that, yes, she loved, but that was never going to welcome him as anything but an oddity and a hassle.

To Bill, though, none of those other sports was synchro. None of them was an opportunity to show how athletic you could be in the water and perform something that could elicit emotion from an audience. None of it was the costumes and the makeup and the music. Bill May lived for the costumes and the makeup and the music. He lived for the water. He was a performer, and an athlete, and both of those aspects of himself were too big to ignore. What better sport to showcase them in the water than synchronized swimming?

He should have felt discouraged, maybe even wanted to call it quits. But back when he was a young trainee, his coaches would goad him to excel by chiding him, telling him he wasn't a world champion yet, and that spurred him on, the idea that other people thought he could be a world champion, that even though he wasn't allowed into the world championship, here were people who knew what they were talking about using his name in the same sentence with "world championship." Here were people who believed that the time would come and they would all see Bill compete.

So he knows how well-regarded he was and still is as a swimmer. He still has all those medals. But as time went on, this was the thought that kept him hungry and began to eat at him: If you believed you belonged on a sport's biggest stage but were banned from that stage, wouldn't you always ask: Did I really belong?

Those who witnessed Bill May at his peak can say that he was the best, that he would have blown everyone out of the deep and gelatin-spattered water, but he'll never really know (and we'll never really know) unless he is allowed to compete in the Olympics, or even just the world championship. Which is to say that as Bill began to train for worlds, he didn't quite know either.

May 2015 Santa Clara, California

The first thing Bill May will ask you when he meets you is: Where are you from and what is your favorite place to eat there? He will ask what your favorite ice cream flavor is and where you were when you first had it. We made a lot of Rocky IV jokes about the training and about Kazan -- the Cold War might be over, but in sports arenas everywhere, whenever it is the Russians vs. the Americans, that movie plays out again and again -- and my favorite joke is this: that the Russian male synchro contender will stomp over to Bill during the meet and say, "I will break you," and Bill will respond, "What's your favorite ice cream flavor?"

Bill May is 5-foot-9 and 155 pounds and carved like a statue. He won't eat mayonnaise or creamy dressings, but that's about all he won't eat. Between practices I watched him consume perhaps nearly every food that didn't contain mayonnaise or a creamy dressing. I've seen him devour a full order of pancakes as a side dish. I've seen him drink multilayered lemonade that looked like a watermelon -- and it wasn't delicious at all, I can promise you that. I've seen him order a refill of it anyway. I've seen him eat a doughnut the size of a newborn while in the pool. I've seen him, post-swim, eat a corned beef sandwich, a sandwich his large, smiley mouth wasn't technically large enough to accommodate. He made it work.

He has a mostly shaved head, with a very short mohawk that brings to mind a rooster, a little banana of hair that looks as if it's been dyed but he swears he never touches it, it's just that he's in the pool so much that it's permanently bleached from the sun and oxidized from the chlorine. When he laughs, he leans his head all the way back and opens up his giant jaw, and his laugh -- heh, heh, heh -- comes from deep within his solar plexus. His body is mostly hairless, his natural fur burned off by the chlorine after hours and hours in the pool, the hair under his arms lasered and smooth. One part of his Cirque du Soleil act involves walking around with his arm extended around the back of his neck, thanks to those double-jointed shoulders. When he first joined, one of the acrobats at Cirque told him, "People are looking at your armpits for two hours a night. You should get rid of the hair."

When Bill was 10, he started training with his local club, the Syracuse Synchro Cats, but they disbanded when their coach moved away. He and the other Synchro Cats set up elaborate car pools to be Oswego Lakettes, an hour each way, eating their dinner and doing their homework in the car. Still, that amounted to maybe four and a half hours in the pool per week, not enough to make a dent -- not enough to make a champion.

And so, when Bill was 16, he hid under the covers in his bedroom in Syracuse, New York, vibrating like a Chihuahua from nerves, and placed his first call to Chris Carver, the famous synchro coach who headed the Aquamaids in Santa Clara, California, and had led Team USA to the Olympics over and over. He'd seen her on TV receiving the Esther Williams award, synchro's version of a lifetime achievement award, and he'd read about her in synchro magazines, which are a thing that exists.

By the time he made that phone call, Carver had heard of him, as had the world of synchro -- the boy from upstate New York, good, not great, doing some better-than-average age-group stuff on the Oswego Lakettes, in a sport so stalwartly female that the names of the teams could also easily be the names of lady-brand cigarettes or sanitary napkins. But all she could think was, A boy! She invited Bill to Santa Clara in the fall of 1995, and there they wrote a duet routine. Among the Aquamaids' coaches at the time was French expat Stephan Miermont, one of the first male synchronized swimmers Bill met.

When it was time to go home after a week, Bill hesitated. Seeing the Aquamaids was like a "mind explosion," he says. There were these California girls, these "tanned beasts" who didn't have to drive an hour just to practice. How could he leave this place, where what he did was taken so seriously and done at such a high level? He asked Carver whether he could come and train with her, and she said yes. His mother was heartbroken. But she prayed on it and realized it was for the best. So Bill's family held back their tears and hugged him goodbye.

The board of the Aquamaids wasn't so easily convinced. The club is technically open to the public, but a boy had never applied for membership and there weren't rules in place to deal with one. How exactly could you integrate him? Synchro's ideal is a group of nose-plugged women looking as close to exactly alike as possible, doing moves that are as close to exactly alike as possible. How do you blend a man into that? What would he even wear?

But Carver didn't think that way. She had her young Aquamaids in the pool at 6 in the morning, lining up their brown-bagged snacks alongside the pool so they didn't have to leave except when nature called. She was so tough and abrasive that her appearance -- blond, blue-eyed, delicate -- became an unsettling comical facade. Carver bred winners in the gold standard and under her mantra: Anyone who has the desire should be able to do it. Bill had that desire. But that didn't persuade the board to let him swim. What, perhaps, did was just the faintest possibility of a lawsuit. Bill was an Aquamaid.

He lived in the homes of host families in Santa Clara. He finished high school and worked at a Baskin-Robbins while he trained. Everyone liked him. Yes, there was the man who booed and the phone call to tell him what a pervert he was. There were the jokes and some ridicule, but there was also something about Bill May that eventually wore people down. Smile.

And he was so happy. Nothing quite gave him the opportunity to tell his story like every pike and every ballet leg and every split and every splash. Smile. He was never able to articulate it until he joined Cirque du Soleil and met the trapeze artists who would say they felt more comfortable in the air. That was it, he realized. He was just more comfortable in the water. Smile.

When Bill was 19, Carver paired him with a young woman from the area named Kristina Lum, a rising star who had been an Aquamaid since she was 8. They began to perform duets together. Kristina would go on to perform in team synchro events at the 2000 Olympics, but she stuck with Bill for the duets, sacrificing a significant portion of her synchro career for someone who might never be able to swim with her in the Olympics.

You should have seen them together. Unable to pretend that they were the same gender of swimmer, too different in body and movement to try the traditional synchro approach, unable to find a single bathing suit they both looked good in, they swam routines of romantic interplay, ballroom dancing on the water, often synchronized but never downplaying the fact that they were a man and a woman.

They played Adam and Eve, fig-leaf bathing suits made by a teammate's mother. In another routine, they were snakes, slithering all over each other. They did "Bolero." They did a tango. They were something to watch, Bill and Kristina. There are only so many female-female routines you could pull off. Bill and Kristina were refreshing.

In 2001, FINA met at a congress after the world championship. Bill and Chris Carver were told that an official from USA Synchro would request a vote for a mixed duet to be included in the next world championship. The vote wasn't on the official agenda; the USA Synchro delegate would have to bring it up for discussion.

In the run-up to the congress, the U.S. lobbied hard and got the support of many of FINA's countries, but not Russia. The Russians didn't have a male synchronized swimmer, and they'd just achieved dominance in regular synchro; they weren't going to give up their wins for the sake of gender equity, especially when they knew the Americans had Bill -- that's not the Russian way. But the other European countries were more progressive, and in Europe synchro is considered an art as much as a sport, so Bill was told to wait by the phone for confirmation that his moment had finally come.

But when the call came, he was told the resolution hadn't passed, although not because of any other country's interference. The vote never happened, and it never happened because the U.S. decided not to request it.

Carver was shocked. Bill was devastated -- his own people? He'd thought they were on his side. But he took a breath and he thought, "Hey, this was just part of the struggle, right? Just another hurdle to jump. Just another hill to climb. Just another sports metaphor to sports metaphor." Still, his own people? He couldn't shake the sense of betrayal he felt. But Bill is Bill -- that smile -- so he moved on, never confronting anyone, never even asking who didn't ask for the vote on his behalf.

He continued to train, but something was different. He was tired. Not physically -- getting physically tired isn't something that happens to Bill May. But the struggle was beginning to feel old. By now, his duet partners were retired. Kristina Lum was packing up for Vegas, where she'd gotten a job in the water show Le Rêve -- The Dream at the Wynn. His other duet partner, with whom he swam when Kristina was training for the Olympics, was now a nurse. Bill went to the 2004 Olympics in Athens to help cheer for the team he swam with. It was there that Bill May's essential Bill May-ness began to show its cracks.

As he sat in the stands as a spectator, as someone who was just watching the sport he dominated, he tried to keep in mind how much he had won, that he'd competed in Switzerland and in Rome. He remembered his love of the sport. He did love the sport. He does love the sport. But for the first time, he felt as if he had lost, as if all the goodwill and the skill and the stick-to-itiveness in the world couldn't help him. He was 25. All his original teammates had retired. Maybe it was time to give up and admit defeat.

That year, Cirque du Soleil called and asked whether he wanted to be in its underwater show, O. Stephan Miermont, his old Aquamaids coach, had performed in the show. Bill accepted the offer and packed his bags for Las Vegas and started choreographing his retirement routine.

May 2004 Santa Clara, California

On the day in 2004 when Bill May retired from synchronized swimming, the stands at the Avery Aquatic Center at Stanford were filled with Bill's friends and family and everyone he'd ever swum with. Chris Carver introduced him, and Bill came out to applause with his hands spread, neck craning; his routine had already begun. He looked up and around, as if he were an alien who had just landed on Earth. He was wearing a swimsuit that was a patchwork of more than 20 of the bathing suits he'd worn at all the competitions he'd won. Over the speakers, as part of the soundtrack, Chris Carver's voice boomed a prerecorded command, "Focus!" and she counted a quick eight. The music too was woven from much of the music he'd used for routines: "Bolero," "Singin' in the Rain," the Smashing Pumpkins' "Disarm."

A woman's voice was overlaid onto the soundtrack. She said, "Bill, where are you going? Stay here with me." There was the sound of a child cackling. A group of women sang, "Happy birthday to Billy." There were other cries from his lifetime of coaches. There was the news report from the night Princess Diana died, followed by the announcement of John Lennon's death, followed by more of Carver's counting, followed by an old news report about Bill May, about what an oddity it was to see a boy performing with girls, that "an athlete's highest honor, an Olympic medal, is out of reach for a male synchronized swimmer."

In the pool, he kept up with the soundtrack, twirling underwater rockets and pikes and fishtails that showed a frenetic distress, the miming of the opening of birthday presents, a portrait of a man gone mad.

He was going for a "schizophrenic" sort of thing because that's how he was feeling at the time: of many minds about his past and future. He tells me it was almost like a call to arms. Like, this is your final destiny. This is where your career ends and something else starts.

The routine finished on Sinatra's "We'll Meet Again," with Bill reaching up out of the pool with his left arm at something unseen while his right arm and legs flailed just below the water line to keep him afloat. And then, as the music ended and the applause swelled, he slowly sank beneath the surface, down, down, down, until you could no longer see him from the stands.