PARIS: This weekend in the northern suburbs of Paris at the newly-built Olympic Aquatics Centre, Bill May will continue his push to secure a landmark spot in the USA artistic swimming team. The fact that May is 45 and has had more comebacks than Sinatra is neither here nor there: the eye-catching thing about his presence at the World Cup event in Saint Denis, a test event for the Games, is that he is on the verge of becoming the first man ever to compete in the event at the Olympics.
Until this year, artistic swimming - the new name for synchronized swimming - was a female-only domain, leaving May to cheer on from the sidelines. If May makes the final eight when the team is cut down from its current 12 members on June 9, it will fulfil the dream he has been living for 35 years. "To say that I’m going to the Olympic Games, it’s something almost unimaginable, because it’s something that I thought that I would never be able to do during my career,” he told AFP at the team’s Olympic training base at Eaubonne, outside Paris.
May, who took up the sport when he was 10 to compete with his sister, was given the big news just before Christmas 2022. "I got a call from a friend and he said: ‘Hey, you’re the first person to know that they’re putting men into the Olympics’. "He said: "’Are you going to do it?’ And I said: ‘This is my life’.” May was a high achiever during the first part of his career, winning the duet at the US national championships and being named the US Synchronized Swimming Athlete of the Year in 1998 and 1999.
But with no place for men at the swimming world championships or the Olympics, May hung up his competitive noseclip in 2004, going on to perform in the water for the Cirque du Soleil. Then came the news that men would be allowed to compete in the world championships in Kazan in 2015 and May came out of retirement. "Without one thought, I said: ‘I’ll do it, no matter what. I don’t care if I’m dead last. I just want to be there. I want to show the world that men should be accepted into the sport of artistic swimming’.”
On July 26, 2015, he made history, becoming the first man ever to win artistic swimming gold at a major event by winning the mixed duet technical routine gold with his partner Christina Jones. They took silver in the free routine and May went on to win medals at world championships in Budapest in 2017, Fukuoka in 2023 and Doha in February this year. "It was a great opportunity for myself but also to show the growth of the sport,” he said. "It was also to inspire other male athletes or other athletes that want to represent diversity in any sport, to see that they can have a dream and push for that dream and nothing can stop them.”
‘Something new’
At the Olympics there is no switching of team members for the three events. The same eight chosen must compete in the technical, free and acrobatic programmes on three successive nights. So the question at this weekend’s test event is: can a 45-year-old Bill May keep in step with his teammates, the next oldest of which is 25 years his junior?
For May it really will be a dream come true if he makes the cut and pulls on the USA uniform in Paris. "I was 10 years old when I walked onto that pool deck and I never looked back,” he says. "I never felt that I was out of place until people asked me: ‘Why are you doing this sport? You’re the only man’. "I never thought that it was anything different than any other athlete at a young age wanting to try something new, wanting to try something that they love. "So this is an opportunity of a lifetime. With the Olympic Games, you’ll see a man included. And I want a small athlete to say: ‘Hey, that’s going to be me one day’.”- AFP