Meet Bill May, synchronized swimmer favored to win double gold medals

At the Olympics, women are allowed to box each other bloody, wrestle until joints dislocate and apply chokeholds in judo until someone passes out.

But a man can't put on a swimsuit and music and perform three minutes of choreography in a pool — yet.

This week at the aquatic world championships in Kazan, Russia — for the first time at a FINA-sanctioned competition — men are allowed to vie for a medal in synchronized swimming. Actually, two medals: one in the mixed technical program and one in the mixed free program, each with a female partner.

One of the requirements for Olympic inclusion is for an event to be held at a world championship. So for male synchronized swimmers, the competition in Kazan is one step closer to that goal, but until participation increases and judging is refined, Olympic status remains a distant hope.

Yet for Bill May, a favorite to win double gold in Kazan, competing there will still be a dream fulfilled. A 36-year-old New York native, he took up the sport at 10 knowing there was no real competitive future beyond nationals, a few international open events (where he would compete against women) and the now defunct Goodwill Games. None of those contests were overseen by the international swimming federation, FINA, which barred men from Olympic and world championship synchronized swimming.

Nonetheless, he persisted and became a 14-time U.S. national champion (in solo, duet and team events) and a silver medalist in duet at the 1998 Goodwill Games. He retired in 2004 after helping many of his female teammates on the Santa Clara Aquamaids crew prepare for the Athens Olympics, where they captured a bronze medal.

But on Nov. 29, 2014, May received startling news. It was after midnight on the Las Vegas Strip, and he had just finished performing in Cirque du Soleil’s “O” show, as he had done for the past 10 years. He went home, checked his email and saw a note from Judy McGowan, the president of USA Synchronized Swimming.

She wrote that the FINA Congress in Doha, Qatar, decided to add two co-ed, or mixed, events at world championships, following a pattern that other sports have recently used to increase public interest. (Triathlon and modern pentathlon, for example, now hold mixed relays.)

May immediately called his mother, Sharon May, in Cicero, New York. Tears fell, and plans brewed.

Next he called Christina Jones, 27, who retired in 2008 and had also just gotten off work at the “O” show. He asked if she would be his partner in the technical routine (in which there are six required elements and symmetry is paramount). “I knew it would completely flip my life upside down for the next half year,” she said. “It would require a ton of work. But Bill is one of my very best friends, and I’ve seen how hard he works. He deserves this more than anything. I couldn’t turn him down.” 

For the free program, May wanted his Goodwill Games partner, Kristina Lum Underwood, a 2000 Olympian who worked on “Le Reve,” another aquatic show in Las Vegas. She was eight months pregnant. Still, he called her. “I said, ‘Do you realize I’m going to have a baby in January and the competition is at the end of July?’” she recalled. “He said, ‘I think you can do it.’”

Lum Underwood, 38, had a 2-year-old son at home as well. And once maternity leave ended, she would be performing two shows a night, five days a week. “My husband, David, looked at me and said, ‘You have to do this.’ I said, ‘You’re right.’” 

May would not have become the nation’s pre-eminent male synchronized swimmer — interviewed by David Letterman and in written up in Sports Illustrated and People magazines in the 1990s — had it not been for two key moments.

One was the day his sister, Courtney May, asked if he would try synchro with her at the local rec center. “Nah, it’s a girl’s sport,” he said, and he planned to stick to gymnastics. But when he saw other boys doing it, he felt it would be OK to try.

The other was a brazen act, five years later. Bill May dialed Chris Carver, the coach at one of the most prestigious synchro clubs in the nation to see if he could train with her team in California.

“For a tiny little 15-year-old to call her from New York was pretty intimidating,” he said. “All I knew was that this is what I wanted to do with my life and this is how I was going to do it. If she said no, I don’t know where I would be or what would have happened.” 

“I had heard about Bill as an age group swimmer,” said Carver, the coach of the Santa Clara Aquamaids. “They said, ‘There’s this little boy, and he’s actually pretty good. But I didn’t know what that meant, really.”

“My criteria for coming to Santa Clara was more desire than ability. Desire was the main thing,” she said.

So at 16, May moved across the country alone, started 11th grade at a new school and lived with a local family. It wasn’t easy for his mother to part with her upbeat middle child. “I knew if I denied him this opportunity to go, I’d lose him,” she said. “He’d pull away from us.”

Despite his determination, he realized after arriving in the Bay Area that he “wasn’t Aquamaid material,” he said. One of his weaknesses was inflexibility.

But Carver said he caught on quickly “and his upside-down work looked pretty good.”

His teammates welcomed him all the same.

“When our coaches told us a male from New York would join us, all of us were really excited and intrigued,” Lum Underwood said. “It was something we’d never seen before. And in synchro, most of us strive to do something new and unique.”

Eventually, Carver partnered Lum Underwood with May, and his artistry improved dramatically. Meanwhile, other Aquamaids were stunned and inspired by his power. John Ortiz, who trained with the team a few years later, said they had no idea that a human could get so high out of the water.

“Upside down, he’d thrust out and be exposed all the way up to his chest and armpits. Upright, he can get his upper thighs and butt out of the water. A lot of his teammates loved the challenge of trying to match that,” Ortiz said.

May was thriving.

“It turned out to be fortunate for us as well,” said Carver, who is a three-time U.S. Olympic coach. “He went on to coach here, brought us many championships and a lot of good publicity — and still does. Anytime I need him, here’s there.”

That means he works bingo nights when he’s in town — famous fundraisers that Carver said generate millions of dollars every year for the club. While much of the revenue covers overhead (the club owns the bingo hall), the remainder funds everything from coaching to pool time to travel. Bingo money is also supporting 2015 world championship team members, including May.

So when he asked Carver to help him prep for the world championships more than a decade after retirement, she agreed.

“He was in good shape but rougher,” she said. Part of it was the typical rustiness, but it didn’t help that he had also been competing in races. (In the masters’ division, he won two national titles in open water: in a 2-mile course in 2011 and a 6-mile one in 2013.)

“He had to get his vertical back,” Carver said, referring to his alignment. Still, at U.S. trials this spring, “people were like, ‘Oh, gosh, we haven’t seen this level in so long.’”

May wasn’t the first male Aquamaid. And he wasn’t the last. But he was certainly the most decorated. And the only one who stuck with it — training 10 hours a day for 10 years with one of the best coaches in the world. His experience will give him a clear edge in Kazan.

“Technically, Bill is, in my eyes, unbeatable,” said Benoit Beaufils, 37, a former Aquamaid who will represent France at the world championships in the mixed free program.

He will swim with three-time world champion and three-time Olympian Virginie Dedieu, 36. Since she lives in France and Beaufils lives in Las Vegas, they trained a lot over the Internet, sending and correcting each other’s videos.

For him, coming out of retirement was a no-brainer. But when he found out who his partner was, it became “Can I actually do this?” Beaufils (like Lum Underwood) performs in “Le Rêve,” but his role is more aerial than aquatic, and “Virginie is the best swimmer France has ever had. So it was very intimidating, considering I hadn’t really been swimming for real in 17 years.”

Stephan Miermont, a two-time French national champion (1990 and 1991 in duet) and one of May’s former Santa Clara coaches, didn’t even try to come back for worlds.

“There’s no way,” said Miermont, 46. “The sport is completely different now. The speed is amazing. It’s mind-blowing to see how many moves they can do in eight counts. Young guys now, like the Russian [Aleksandr Maltsev] and the Italian [Giorgio Minisini] move really fast.”

At a test event in Italy in June, Maltsev and his partner won the technical routine. Minisini was runner-up (out of four pairs). In the free routine, Minisini won with a different partner (beating Colombia, the only other entry).

Despite the dearth of competition, May knows gold isn’t a given. “It’s tough to say who the toughest competition is, because we’ve never competed against each other,” he said.

In any case, it should be crowd pleaser. “The public will enjoy this because they’ll understand it, the artistic and romantic connection,” Carver said. “Particularly in the duet. With two women swimming together, [judges are] looking for twins — legs that look alike, people that move alike, physical compatibility. But if you’re looking for something artistic, then it’s natural to see a man swim with a woman. We see this in ice skating. We see it in ballet. It adds a whole dimension to the sport.”

But unlike skating and ballet, which have the advantage of solid ground, it is extremely difficult to coordinate men and women precisely in the water.

“When you get to the technical program, where everything has to be exactly the same, it is a tremendous challenge,” Carver said. “They have different centers of gravity. Also, the female is very floaty because of body fat. Bill has more muscle. It’s a tremendous compromise between the two styles.

“But the potential is amazing,” she added. “I think it’s going to revitalize the sport.”

Already it has revitalized May. He said he plans to continue competing even after the finals of his world championship events (on July 26 and 30). And if mixed synchro ever becomes an Olympic discipline? He will be ready.

“Even if I’m 100 years old,” he said, “I might roll myself down in a wheelchair. But I’ll be there.”

“I’m back!”