In the Pool, a Thing of Beauty
For U.S. Synchronized Swimmers, It's Anything but Routine

By Les Carpenter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 20, 2008

BEIJING -- Inside the two-inch window of a video camera's screen a masterpiece comes to life. Women churn across water, arms swinging, legs flailing, first together, then apart in an aquatic form of controlled chaos. Music blares. Splashes everywhere. A swimmer bursts from the waves -- a blue torpedo rising high then dipping gracefully beneath the ripples.

And come Saturday, when Stephan Miermont's vision is transferred from tape to the Olympics, he is sure synchronized swimming will never be the same.

The head choreographer for the U.S. synchronized swimming team sees things others do not. He sees beauty in the streets. He sees movement in the air. "I love to create emotions," he says. "I love to make people cry."

He also likes to shock people. "I love to break the rules," he says. "I love to push the walls."

Miermont has come to Beijing expecting to break every rule and crush every norm of a staid sport that has long established what defines its rules and norms. Where the other teams will have their swimmers moving in unison for 80 percent of their routines, the Americans will stay together for maybe 30 percent. Otherwise they break off into small pockets of swimmers, each contorting themselves in such a way as to make a huge picture in the water.

When it is unveiled during the freestyle competition, Miermont just knows the crowd will stare in bewildered silence, mouths agape, then erupt into a roar never heard at a Olympic synchronized swimming competition.

"I don't really care about the score, we can't control that," he says. "What I want is a standing ovation. If all the people who come to watch and see are standing up then it will be a success."

Which in this sport can be hard to assess. Synchronized swimming has struggled to find its place in the Olympics after it was introduced in Los Angeles in 1984 as a test sport for duets and later expanded in Atlanta in 1996 to team competition. Mocked as nothing more than a water dancing show, it has survived to become the domain of the Russians, who overtook the United States during the 2000 Olympics in Sydney.

Team competition is judged in two parts, each counting for half the score. First is the technical element, which has very strict rules and is something of a skills test. But during the more exciting freestyle event teams can border on the outlandish, as the French did in 1996, designing a routine depicting Jewish women being led to German concentration camps until wiser minds prevailed and the performance was changed.

Even though Miermont's innovation has been on display in the practice pool for several days and every other nation in the competition has stationed coaches in the stands to videotape it, he speaks of it as if it is a secret, hesitant to reveal its full splendor, almost sounding fearful of diminishing the effect. He considers his routine to be a story, one that evolves in several parts over four minutes.

Those who have watched are awed.

"I just ask Russia, 'What do you think of the routine?' " Miermont says delicately in a French accent that can sometimes create odd idioms. "She says, 'It's amazing.' "

U.S. Coach Tammy McGregor says the Israeli coach told her "it is so nice, so refreshing to see someone do something so new and creative."

Creativity is not a beloved trait in synchronized swimming. Innovation usually comes when one country sees another doing something, makes tiny tweaks, then unveils a performance that it claims as its own. Nothing is truly original. Nobody takes chances. McGregor compares it to fashion, saying all the stores are selling capri pants and maybe one distinguishes itself from the others by adding lace to the trim. Otherwise nobody's capris look different from anybody else's.

"This is completely different," she adds.

The women swimming Miermont's routine say it is dangerous, not from the standpoint of injury, but because the maneuvers don't always work right. It is so complex, so intricate that mistakes will be made. Elements that are supposed to work perfectly won't every time. "You don't want that in synchronized swimming," says Kim Probst, a co-captain of the U.S. team, emphasizing the obvious.

And yet this imperfection is also the brilliance of the routine. McGregor, who demands perfection from every movement, says she misses the mistakes when watching Miermont's routine, finding herself caught up in the overall performance, waiting for the next piece of the story to come. "And I see it every day," she says. "I know what's coming."

The ultimate test, she says, is that her male friends who have seen the routine love it, vividly recalling details of it days later. This is promising, she believes, "since men never pay attention to any details."

Then again this is why she hired Miermont away from his life in Las Vegas, where he helped design "O," the Cirque du Soleil's aquatic show at the Bellagio hotel. She wanted unique. The Americans are never going to be as technically perfect as the Russians. The team will never be made up of women exactly 5 feet 6 with the ideal arm length. If the United States was going to seize an advantage, it needed to create the most innovative routine imaginable.

Which apparently Miermont, 40, has done. As in a kaleidoscope, the groups of American swimmers will be ever evolving, each piece moving into another rather than breaking up to begin a new story.

No nation has tried anything like this. But Miermont has little use for the way synchronized swimming is currently performed. He is tired of the shows every country puts on. His performance was going to have to be abstract, unique, overwhelming to the eye.

Two years ago, at the FINA World Trophy Cup, he tried something that broke from the regular mode of an entire team moving as one and the United States won, beating Russia, which hadn't happened in years. Emboldened by this result, he pushed for a performance even grander that would shatter every expectation.

He found it one day last summer while watching the Swiss Bejart Ballet perform in his native Saint-Etienne, France. In one of the dances, the theater suddenly went dark, and the dancers padded around the floor in a pantomime of a frantic search for light. Shrouded in blackness, the audience was forced to listen, imagining the dancers' movements somewhere in the gloom. At the end a light appeared in the ceiling, beaming down on the stage floor. Light had been found. And Miermont was entranced.

Light. He could do something with light. He plunged into days of research, reading books on light and scouring the Internet. He studied the first few pages of the Bible, hunting for hidden meanings in the story of Creation. Then he molded this vision into a narrative, ultimately shaping a story so complex he is certain most of the people watching will not understand. He told each swimmer her role, her place in the story so she could grasp his vision and perform with the required emotion.

Eventually, McGregor had to ask: Just what was this routine supposed to be?

Sitting in the Water Cube, as Beijing's National Aquatics Center is known, one recent day after a practice, Miermont sighs.

There is light, he says. Then there is a boom and the light goes away and the swimmers must dance through the water searching for the light, trying to rebuild their broken world. And in the end, just as in the theater in Saint-Etienne, the light returns.

"And everything is beautiful," he says.

He describes this as "being pretty much like a science fiction movie." And because he has mixed in many pieces of what he calls "hard rock" music, he frets that one or two of the judges "might have a heart attack." Not that this thought seems to displease him. A heart attack would be the ultimate emotion, a sign that yes, indeed, his performance had left its mark.

Asked for a name for this routine, he smiles and says, "Light."

That's it?

"Light," he repeats.

When asked if Miermont's creation will shock the synchronized swimming world, Heather Olson, a former U.S. synchronized swimmer and now an NBC commentator, thinks for a moment. Then she nods.

"I think so," she says.

Though she adds, "There is a fine line between random and purposefully creative."

For Miermont, the son of a general in the French Army and a dancer, that seems of little concern. He is fully prepared to see the judges so startled by what he has wrought that the worst scores of the Olympics will appear on the board. If so, he will not mind. Just as long as he leaves the crowd shocked and the cheers pour down all around him.