Bill May's Olympic Swimming Story Is 20 Years in the Making

Not all Olympic stories have a happy ending, and this one, which has been 24 years in the making is one of those good news/bad news tales but it's intriguing.

Artistic swimmer Bill May, who was awarded a gold medal in the 2015 FINA World Championships, has been trying to compete in the Olympic Games since 2020 when he was part of a movement to get the Olympics to qualify men in the artistic swimming category.

This year, for the Paris Olympic Games, men are eligible to compete for the first time in the team and duet events, and May qualified for the squad—yay, finally!—but then, he was told no.

“I was on the squad that qualified and then they cut it down to eight, and I got cut, so now I’m going as an athlete representative from World Aquatics, which is the governing body of all aquatic sports,” May told Parade in this exclusive interview.

While happy in his role, May says, “It’s difficult because it’s not something that I always felt like my life was going to be incomplete had I not gone to the Olympics, but for the very first time to allow men to compete at the Olympic games and the coaches didn’t have the courage to put a man on the team…”

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It isn’t just the U.S. team that made the decision to still exclude men, but also Italy and China, all countries that do have male World Champions. May earned his gold medal in 2015 with Christina Jones for Mixed Duet Technical.

“They can’t say, 'The man didn’t fit, or the man wasn’t good enough',” May continues. “It wasn’t this. But to be supported by the Olympic committee, to be supported by World Aquatics, they know that the future of the sport relies on this, and that’s where I feel we failed the evolution of the sport.”

That said, May, who is the head coach for the Santa Clara [Calif.] artistic swimming team, still gets to go to Paris. He says, “I still love what I do and feel so much support from everyone, so life goes on.”

May was introduced to Parade not because of his Olympic story, which happens to be timely, but because of his role in the documentary Cirque du Soleil: Without a Net, currently streaming on Prime Video, the story of how the company, which had to shut down all 44 of its shows during the COVID pandemic, rebooted their flagship production O, in which May was an artistic swimmer. Filmmaker Dawn Porter captures the dramatic journey of the world’s most famous circus act on its way back from the brink and May shared his experiences.

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How did you come to join Cirque du Soleil?

In 2000, they tried to put men into the Olympic games, but the timing was off, and it just didn’t go. I kept swimming, kept competing. I would compete at open competitions, which were any competition that a country hosted itself, so I went to the Swiss Open, the French Open, the German Open, the Rome Open. These were competitions that were not sanctioned by World Aquatics, which is the governing body of all aquatic sports. So, because they didn’t have to follow their rules, they could allow men to compete openly.

Then in 2004, I helped coach the Olympic team, and then after the Olympics I joined Cirque du Soleil right away, and I was there until the end of, well, technically ‘22, but ‘21.

And then in 2015, while I was still at Cirque, World Aquatics voted to allow men to compete in the mixed duet, which is duet of a man and woman at the world championships. So, I came out of retirement. My partner and I became the first-ever world champions in the mixed duet.

I was retired from the sport, so I was very happy with my career. Everyone has something that they didn’t do in the sport, but I retired to join Cirque du Soleil. There were plenty of things that maybe I could say that I never did, however, there’s also more things that I could say I did get to do that this sport gave me. So, I didn’t have any regrets, I didn’t have any feeling of being wronged or left out.

The great thing about Cirque du Soleil is it gives athletes and performers and talented people an opportunity to continue to do what they love and make a career out of it. With a lot of sports, you’re working multiple jobs and you’re trying to get funding the whole time, so [Cirque] takes that pressure off of you. To do something where you’re paid to do what you love for thousands of people per night, it’s an opportunity that it’s almost incomparable to that one competition that I couldn’t go to.

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The film is interesting because it’s about the comeback of O following COVID and we see a little bit of how people survived. When you had to come back, were you in shape? Had you kept swimming?

They had a meeting and they said, “Okay, we’re done. They’re closing the show on Sunday night and that’ll be our last show.” “I was like, “Oh, man.” But I was teaching core classes, like fitness classes at O. So right when that happened, all the people that were doing it said, “Hey, let’s just do it,” so I started doing it. And because we were off, I was doing it every day, even twice a day on Sundays for the first few weeks, and then it just got more and more serious.

Obviously, we knew we weren't going to open anytime soon, so I taught core classes seven days a week. I had a lot of people, there were times when I had over 100 people in my core class, and that was the crazy thing about Zoom. It brought people together from all over the world and still allowed us to connect with each other.

And then I also swam. We swam out at the lake. I had some swim buddies and we would go out, it was a national park so we couldn’t drive our car in there, so we had to park outside and then ride our bikes in and then we would swim together. And then I would teach later in the afternoon.

I would go over my routine thinking, “Okay, next week if it starts back up I need to be ready.” So, every day I would stretch and I would work on my flexibility and go over my routines. And then, what was it, 14, 18 months later, we didn’t open until then. So, it was a long stint, but it was crazy.

When it came back, it was so exciting to go back and see everyone. They’re essentially your family because you’re trusting them every night. Your family’s expecting for these people to allow you to come home that night, so you have to put so much trust in your castmates that it’s almost more than family. These people are in control of your life sometimes, so it was crazy.

How hard did that make it for you to leave Cirque du Soleil and take the coaching job in Santa Clara?

It was such a sad-happy moment in my life because I was doing something that I really wanted to do. The timing was off. It was like a death in my life because I didn’t want to leave. I never wanted to leave Cirque du Soleil. If you had asked me how I would spend the rest of my life, I would have said I’m going to be at O, thinking they wouldn’t kick me out, maybe they would, but I was going to be there forever and ever and ever. There’s nothing that you couldn’t like about it. I love to swim. I swam every single day. I still swim every single day.

I would sometimes stare up at the lights in this one specific part of the show, and not to sound cliché, but I would just say, “Okay, I’m here and there’s 2,000 people out there that are just giving of themselves, paying a lot of money to come and see us. They’re stepping out of their daily life and maybe problems or troubles, to forget everything and to be part of this magical world that only lasts for a few hours and then they have to go back to their realities, and sometimes their reality isn’t as positive.” So, they’re asking us for a gift, so to be able to do that, it was such an incredibly difficult thing for me to leave and know that I’ll never be able to go back.

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Never?

I would never say never because, obviously, I went back and I tried out for the Olympics at 44 years old, but now I love my life as the head coach of this club and I know this is where I’ll probably be for the rest of my life. Again, it would have been nice to be at Cirque the rest of my life as well as do this for the rest of my life. So, if I could have had a parallel universe, one, I would be at Cirque du Soleil and one I would be the head coach of the Santa Clara Artistic Swimming Club.

Do you think of coaching as passing on your love of the sport to the next generation? Who knows, one of your team might end up in O.

I hope so, because it really is that next step. Not everyone needs to go to the Olympics, or they don’t even need to dream of going to the Olympics, but to say that they’re path is in the sport, they know what they want to do and they know what’s going to make them happy. That is something, if Cirque du Soleil is what makes them happy, that would make me unbelievably happy because it gave me so much joy in my life. So, I would love that.

Have a great time in Paris. What does an athlete’s representative do?

I’m going as an ambassador. So I will be with the judges, I’ll communicate with the athletes, and I will just promote the sport and interact with anybody that needs anything. I can consult on different rules and stuff. After the Olympics, they’re going to change some of the rules so we’ll probably have some meetings for that. That’s probably be about it, and then I’ll go to some meet and greets.

Cirque du Soleil: Without a Net is currently streaming on Prime Video.

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