by Mary Pilon
What some of the members of various governing bodies in sports saw merely as a job was “a lifelong dream to the man I love,” Amanda wrote. “What may be a simple bureaucratic hurdle to them is a constant reminder to Kevin that cancer took away his ability to procreate and threatened his life at a young age. His courage and his determination are a shining example of making it against the odds.
“Medal or no medal, Kevin’s success in Olympic sailing is already a testament to the power and triumph of a childhood dream.”
Amanda also had other news that wasn’t ready for prime time.
She was pregnant.
KEVIN
Although the Olympics is an experience that most competitors prepare for all of their lives, there is still a surreal nature to it all when it actually happens. There are things that can’t be explained or prepared for: the worldwide press, fans, sponsors, cameras on at all times, the increasingly whirlwind pace of online news, and psychological pressure tied to competing on the world’s biggest stage. For fifteen years, people had been telling Kevin that he was crazy for thinking he was on television and having his story beamed out around the world. Now it was actually happening.
Among the topics in pre-game advice addressed by the U.S. Olympic Committee was how much, if at all, athletes should see friends or family before a competition. Generally, the advice was that seeing loved ones can be a distraction, unless a particular family member is established as part of a pre-competition routine. In theory that made sense, but in practice it was difficult to adhere to. Family members, even with the best of intentions, want to load up their Olympian with well wishes (and, unintentionally, the weight of their expectations14). Kevin loved his mother, but couldn’t have been more angry with her when she approached him at the team hotel, as it unintentionally rattled his focus.
Tension ahead of the Athens Olympics was exceptionally high, as the Games would be the first ones staged since the terrorist attacks of September 11. As a representative of the United States, Kevin was both a symbol of patriotism and a target, something the news media was reminding Athens-bound athletes of on a daily basis. Knowing this, and hoping to keep the pressures of being an Olympian at bay, he not only stayed on his medication, but increased his dosage.
Amanda was scheduled to arrive in Greece earlier than the rest of Kevin’s family. Two weeks before her flight, she called him with the news that she had just returned from the doctor’s office. They were pregnant.
Kevin felt a wave of joy mixed with an unexpected hit of sadness and grief15 over the biological children he couldn’t have swelling up in him again. “When it was hypothetical that we were making a baby with the help of someone we’d never met,” Kevin later wrote, “it all sounded pretty great. When it was staring me in the face, the thing I couldn’t do, it felt completely different. Combined with the trip to the lab to again give blood—so that some bureaucracy could maybe, but maybe not, tell me once and for all that I was ‘okay enough to join the rest of the Olympians, despite my differences’—Amanda’s news was ten parts happy and exciting, ten million parts rubbing my face in the fact that I wasn’t a man.”16
Right, wrong, or somewhere in between, Kevin couldn’t deny how he felt. The timing of it all—just weeks before the Olympics, should he be allowed to compete—couldn’t have been worse.
•
The Athens opening ceremonies were anticipated to be the grandest ever. Held in the brand-new Olympic stadium in Maroussi, a suburb of Athens, the event would be broadcast worldwide in high definition for the first time and would attract more than seventy thousand spectators in person, including myriad heads of state, members of royal families, and former U.S. president George H. W. Bush. The ceremony would weave in artistry and references to the ancient Olympic Games, as the competition was being held on the very soil where they had started centuries earlier. Never mind that the small Mediterranean country wasn’t entirely sure how it would pay for such a spectacle; beneath the welcoming smiles, confetti, and Olympic rings, the budget was swelling.
The countries were to march, one by one, and as was typical, the United States would have one of the largest delegations. Owing to Greek opposition to the recent American-led invasion of Iraq, there was some concern that the American athletes would be met with boos when they entered the stadium.
In spite of such concerns, excitement still permeated the American athletes and there was much buzz among them that Kevin Hall—the man who had beaten cancer—would be the Games’ flag bearer for their country. It’s tradition for the athletes to vote and decide the position on their own and when the votes were cast, Kevin found himself in the position of runner-up, as his teammate Dawn Staley, a basketball player who had previously won two gold medals at the Atlanta and Sydney Games, received the most votes. Kevin had a hard time letting go of this loss. His feelings had nothing to do with Dawn Staley; rather, he simply bought into what the media had suggested about how he deserved the title. But “runner-up flag bearer” was what he would have to live with.
As the night fell and loud music blared, he stood behind the stadium with his fellow athletes, getting ready for the march. The jitters and joy of the parade were infectious. Examining the words written on the jacket that the U.S. Olympic Committee had issued him, he read a reminder of Olympic icon Pierre de Coubertin’s credo: “The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part. Just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph, but the struggle.”
Fuck that, Kevin thought. He wanted a medal.
KRISTINA
Kristina boarded her flight to Europe with her fiancé, Bud. The two had met when both were living in Kneeland, California, a small town in Humboldt County when Bud was enjoying a post-cycling drink at a bar with a friend and spotted a woman at the end of the bar doing a crossword puzzle. He reasoned that a woman who spent her time doing word games must be smart, and so, with some nudging, he made his move. They compared notes and realized that they were both Grateful Dead fans and that they might even have attended at least one of the same shows, ages ago in Oakland. Kristina wondered if he had been the guy who had passed her a joint and said his name was Bud. At the time, she had shaken it off as a joke, but later, she couldn’t help but think that might have been the first thing her future husband had ever said to her.
Even by West Coast hippie standards, Bud had an astonishingly tranquil and peaceful demeanor. He had spent twenty years working at the cooperative grocery store and remained unflappable when dealing with even the most unruly of customers. It served him well in dealing with any form of volatility, including the bustle of international travel to an Olympic Games with future in-laws.
As they entered the tube of the airplane for the long journey to Europe, Kristina noticed a copy of USA Today sitting on each seat. She examined it. A photograph on the front page showed a pack of smiling Americans in red shirts, navy pants and matching berets, marching proudly behind the Stars and Stripes. She looked closer. She was never great with faces.17
Is that my brother next to the flag? she asked Bud.
It was. Kristina couldn’t help but think that this whole Show thing was quickly becoming very meta.
KEVIN
Kevin had agreed to meet anti-doping officials at nine o’clock on the morning of his first Olympic race for yet another round of blood testing. The plan was for the sample to be tested while Kevin was on the water, and it was a drill that was to be repeated daily.
So he was surprised when his team cell phone rang at 5:45 a.m. An official told him that there had been a change of plans. He would have to come through more than thirteen miles of Athens traffic18 to the Main Stadium for his blood testing no later than seven. This last-minute hiccup was precisely the kind of unexpected kerfuffle that can test the fragile, game-day psyche of an athlete.
This wasn’t the plan. This wasn’t the plan at all. Even up until the day of the race itself, there had been one hurdle after another, one person, place, or thing telli
ng him that Olympic racing wasn’t for him.
Kevin threw the cell phone across the room, smashing it into chunky plastic fragments. It had to be The Show. They were messing with him on the first day of the Olympics. It seemed perfectly clear. There was no other explanation that made any sense.
Observing his outburst, Amanda calmed Kevin down and persuaded him to take his meds. This was not the moment for pharmaceutical experimentation.
•
Kevin arrived at the Agios Kosmas Olympic Sailing Centre just in time. Located in southwest Athens along the coast, it was a hangar-like complex19 that could accommodate more than three hundred boats, and more than four hundred athletes across all the sailing classes were present. The venue was brand-new, having been built specifically for the Olympics, and there were still stickers on some of the furniture and spots of wet paint. The hope among Olympics organizers was that the facility would help revitalize the waterfront district after all the medals had been handed out and the anthems played.
Sailing took place during almost the entire three-week span of the Olympic Games. Eleven events, each involving a number of races, were scheduled over seventeen days: four for men, four for women, and three that were “open” to both men and women, the rare coed Olympic sport. The marina was located about nine miles from Athens city center, with a long port that had an extensive security system, including cameras, to ensure that the millions of dollars in equipment remained safe.
Kevin was to compete in grueling marathon of eleven races spread over ten days. The athlete who had compiled the best score at the end of his or her races would win. The races encompassed a variety of conditions; shifting breezes made for a mix of light, medium, and heavy sailing.20 At the first turn of the first race, he was well positioned, asserting himself early against his competitors. Soon, however, he dropped back a few places, which crumpled him emotionally for the rest of the day.
In a later event, as he was leading a race, he received a yellow flag for “pumping”—meaning that a judge believed he had fanned the sail too much. It was a first for Kevin in his career, and it meant that he was on notice: another yellow flag risked disqualifying him from the race altogether. The flag hung in his mind as he sailed tight downwind for the rest of the event.
The start of the last race was one of Kevin’s most brilliant moments on the water. His boat soared with an effortlessness typically reserved for sailing in paintings. But his performance zigzagged after leading the first turn, he bounded for the finish line, his friends and family watching, and it was unclear how he would finally fare.
AMANDA
All of the sailboats at the Olympics were virtually identical, only flags distinguishing them from afar, making it hard for Amanda to tell how her husband was holding his own against the competition from her perch on the family spectator boat. The flag on Kevin’s was a navy blue with USA at the top,21 but Amanda could barely make out her husband, dressed like many of his fellow competitors: a hat to keep the sun off his shaved head, sunglasses, a long-sleeved white, Lycra shirt, tight gloves, white vest, and gray wetsuit.
She wondered if it had been a mistake to tell him about the pregnancy so close to the Olympics, but she reasoned that it could have been far worse not to. She also knew that as husband and wife, and after all they had been through, she couldn’t have kept the news a secret much longer. Doing so would likely have led to her acting differently and stressing out Kevin even more. It was exciting news, something they had hoped for and gone to great lengths to make happen. What’s more, she had endured weeks of in vitro treatments that had left her feeling bloated, hormonal, and exhausted during her rotations22 at the hospital. Perhaps she had underestimated what Kevin’s reaction to the news would be.
Amanda and the others watched as Olympic gold medalist Ben Ainslie of Great Britain started the event poorly but made it to the finish line and the final race in first place, nabbing the second gold medal of his career and the second gold medal for the 2004 British Olympic sailing team. Spain’s Rafael Trujillo Villar was behind him with the silver, and Poland’s Mateusz Kusznierwicz came in with the bronze.
From there, the boats just seemed to whir by, one after another.
Kevin finished eleventh overall.23
GORDON
It would have been tremendous for Kevin to make the Olympic podium, of course, Gordon thought, but he was still proud of his son for having made it to the Games at all, especially after what he had been through. Kevin didn’t need a round piece of metal on a ribbon to show his grit as an athlete and Gordon wondered if expressing this feeling to Kevin was too little too late after all the years he had spent impressing on his son the importance of achievement. He thought back to the mantel at their home in Ventura, crammed with the trophies that Kevin had brought home from his run on the junior sailing circuit. Gordon now realized that what he had thought was encouragement and positive reinforcement might instead have been unintentionally harmful in establishing such a narrow definition of success.
The results were in.
Gordon didn’t know what to say.
KEVIN
Ahead of the medal ceremony, Kevin roamed with his family, crestfallen as they tried to find seats. The whole moment was starting to stress him out, even though the competition had concluded. Kevin spotted one of the American coaches and bolted away from his family, watching the ceremony with him instead.
Television cameras rolled, capturing the action. A green olive wreath was carefully placed on the head of each medal winner, a nod to the ancient Olympic tradition of crowning the victors with laurels. A gold medal hanging from a multicolored ribbon was placed around the neck of Ben Ainslie, who smiled and waved in his white and navy Team GB track jacket to fans and cameras. Over loudspeakers, the British national anthem “God Save the Queen” blared as the Union Jack was hoisted up the flagpole, with the flags for Spain and Poland on either side. The ceremony reminded Kevin of the many times he’d stood on the podium after sailing in the junior regattas that had so consumed him in his younger years. This time, however, he had lost.
Kevin also wondered if, as a child, he had been so immersed in the life of a junior sailor that he’d never had a real childhood at all—and whether that was by his own doing or his parents’. But it was futile to ruminate over all that at this point, he thought. And intellectualizing what had happened at the Games seemed a worthless pursuit as well.
•
Kevin’s memory for races was usually sharp, but he was quick to block out much of what happened in Athens. It was as if he had boarded the plane to Greece, then suddenly found himself at the medal ceremony, sitting next to Team USA’s coach. He knew he had raced, and he knew he wasn’t pleased with the outcome, but the details existed in a haze.
Looking at his family, seated far away, he felt a profound sense of shame. He interpreted his father’s face, which seemed to be set in a mix of confusion, disgust, and disrespect. The thought of watching some of his friends win Olympic medals, being the stars on camera after all of his work, was complicated. On the one hand, he was really happy for Rafa and felt moved by Mateusz’s joy in winning, a long gap since he had won a gold medal in the Finn eight years before in Atlanta. Yet Kevin felt he had shamed his family and himself, his perfectionistic tendencies slamming him harder than ever before.
He had thought during his last race that he could bounce back in the second half, but his strength and stamina had failed him.
“There wasn’t an evil conspiracy designed to keep Kevin Hall from having a nice week at the Olympics, not at all,” Kevin had told a reporter with the Baltimore Sun. He had been reluctant to talk to the press24 during the competition and only agreed to talk once his final race was over. “Not at all. Even with team doctors here and the paperwork done, it turned out to be a big deal to get an injection.”
One of the peculiarities of elite sports is the expectation of the press and fans for an athlete not only to be articulate, but to be so within seconds of a major l
ife moment and the endorphin rush of a physical feat. As Kevin spoke to the press, he found himself in that strange window of processing what had happened, his thoughts still a jumble, his brain in overdrive.
“I hate to even talk about it,” he said of his results, “because it sounds like sour grapes and I’m blaming everything on that. It’s not that. It’s just that my goal was to sail well here, personally, even if that meant that I was last.
“I think I would have been somewhat pleased and realized I don’t have the skill, but at least I tried and gave it my all,” he said. But, he said, he didn’t feel as though that was the case in Athens; he felt that he could have pushed harder. Even U.S. Sailing’s Olympic director acknowledged that Kevin getting his testing and shots taken prior to the races “didn’t go as smoothly as it should have.”
Kevin tried to tell himself that he hadn’t done so badly; he’d placed mid- to top-of-fleet among the best sailors in the world. He had finished ahead of some competitors who had been far better prepared than he was, especially considering that he had been sailing the Finn for less than a year. Sailing insiders and lay fans alike talked of their admiration for Kevin’s perseverance in the wake of cancer, with many news outlets comparing his saga to that of Lance Armstrong, the cycling champion. (It would be eight years before Armstrong would be banned from his sport when his role in an elaborate doping ring came to light.) In those simpler times, the comparison with Armstrong was considered a compliment25: both men had rebounded from diseases that tried to take over their bodies, only to return to their athletic endeavors stronger than ever.
None of that was processing with Kevin. Eleventh wasn’t what his childhood self had been gunning for. Eleventh wasn’t what he wanted stitched into his Olympic jacket. Eleventh wasn’t the text he wanted to see following his name in the record books, a documentation of his immortality in a sport that would endure long after he would. Eleventh, to Kevin, meant failure. What would he tell his soon-to-be-arriving child?