The Kevin Show

by Mary Pilon

  Their respective families welcomed the news. That included Kevin’s father, but his reasons for being in favor of the marriage were not what Kevin had hoped for. Gordon was happy that Amanda was taking over the responsibility of making sure that Kevin remained stable.195 She was well aware that Kevin had bipolar disorder but was opting into the relationship nonetheless.

  “I’m glad you two are getting married,” Gordon said. “Now Kevin is off my desk and on Amanda’s.”196

  The coldness of that statement, whether intended or not, would reverberate in Kevin’s and Amanda’s heads for years.

  KEVIN

  Amanda and Kevin were married on the lush and meticulously manicured grounds of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden on April 29, 2001, a decade after their first meeting in physics class at Brown. Amanda’s mother had spearheaded most of the planning, as Kevin was absorbed with sailing, Amanda with medicine, and neither one had much interest in an elaborate ceremony. Kevin insisted on wearing red shoes; Amanda, a classic strapless white dress.

  Kevin and Amanda’s wedding, 2001 (courtesy Kevin Hall)

  After the ceremony, the couple made their way to the reception. For their first dance, Kevin and Amanda chose Alanis Morissette’s “That I Would Be Good.” With a circle of people in suits and dresses around them, smiling and watching, Kevin heard the Director again.

  Kevin looked into Amanda’s eyes. He was desperately trying to talk himself out of The Show. He could see everything spiraling into something like the Boston Harbor fiasco, with him bursting out in front of their family and closest friends and accusing Amanda of being a spy. The moment fired off a new level of intensity for Kevin, and a feeling hit him, as if a light switch had been flipped on.

  Where were the cameras?

  that I would be good even if I lost sanity

  The Director went away after what felt to Kevin like several minutes, though it was probably more like forty-five seconds. But he still came too close.

  •

  Five months after Kevin and Amanda danced in the Botanic Garden, al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked planes and crashed them into the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center, killing 2,996 people. For Amanda, the disaster had literally hit close to home, her birthplace just uptown from where the towers had fallen.

  It also raised questions about the Olympics—typically a global, feel-good gathering—in a new age of terror. Still, Kevin had set his entire being on making the American team bound for the 2004 Athens Games.197 He began to put together donations to finance his campaign and was pleased when both his mother and father agreed to chip in. Making their lives somewhat easier financially was the money that Kevin had earned from the 2003 America’s Cup cycle, further benefitted by a strong New Zealand-to-U.S.-dollar exchange rate.198 It wouldn’t be long before that had evaporated, however, and according to their most optimistic estimates, Kevin and Amanda would be looking at atleast $20,000 of debt for him to compete at the Olympics, plus what Amanda owed from medical school.

  For the Athens Games, Kevin decided to return to the Finn class, the same one he had tried heading into the 1992 Olympics. Once again, he worried about being something of a chronic event switcher in sailing, but the challenge of it was irresistible, the steep end of the learning curve being where Kevin felt most at home.

  In the spring of 2003, he scraped together what funds he and Amanda had saved up and had a 16-foot Olympic Finn dinghy shipped to them in the United States from Holland. He sailed one event, performed horribly, and almost quit altogether. With his body feeling out of shape and his pocketbook anemic, Kevin’s first few weeks of Finn sailing was brutal. Although he had gone to such great lengths to make that first week of Olympic training happen, he seriously considered returning the dinghy to its owner, but knew that he couldn’t. When he had sailed as a child, long before The Show, he had acted like he belonged in the front of the pack, and his sailing had matched that attitude. Somewhere along the way, though, he had lost his confidence and was struggling to get it back. But Kevin had been dreaming of the Olympics since childhood. He really wanted the medal.

  This time, things felt different. This Olympics felt like his.

  PART III

  THE LOWS

  … yet from those flames,

  No light, but rather darkness visible.

  —JOHN MILTON, Paradise Lost

  It’s terrible, Bob, to think that all I’ve suffered, and all the suffering I’ve caused, might have arisen from the lack of a little salt in my brain.

  —ROBERT LOWELL, writing to his publisher, Robert Giroux

  The biggest lie told in professional sports is “We’re just going out there to have fun.”

  —LARRY ELLISON

  AMANDA

  Amanda and Kevin shared a one-room home in Bowie, Maryland, both of their days long but rewarding, with Kevin on the water and Amanda on her emergency room shifts. She was living in a world balanced on the edge of the area’s most harrowing poverty, he in a world balanced on the cusp of extreme wealth. Yet both were finally living and working together.

  The University of Maryland Medical Center unit was one of the more grueling places to spend time1 in as a medical resident, or as a human of any sort. One of the top programs in the world2 for emergency doctor residents, it was located in an area that had a harrowing history of homicides and street violence, part of the city that would one day serve as the inspiration for David Simon’s gritty television series The Wire. Through it passed a stream of gunshot and knife wound victims, bodies worn out with the long-term effects of drug addiction, and patients who lacked regular medical treatment. The first shock trauma unit in the country when it had opened fifty years earlier, it was initially known as the “death lab”3—until more patients began to survive.

  Kevin didn’t stay in Maryland long, though. To make it to Athens, he would need to be based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where the U.S. trials for the Olympics were scheduled to take place. He had attempted the U.S. trials enough to know that the more time he practiced in the actual competition waters, the more relaxed and prepared he would be for the actual competition. He and Amanda made a schedule of flights and visiting times, and with his boat in tow, Kevin left for Fort Lauderdale with a kiss.

  KEVIN

  For the six months leading up to the Finn trials, Kevin had to both try to completely focus on preparing for a single series of moments, and create a sense of muscle memory to kick in during big moments. Imposter syndrome crept in from time to time, and he wondered if Amanda might wake up one day and think she had made a mistake in marrying him, or if making his fourth bid for the Olympics was an even more insane notion than anything he experienced in The Show.

  There were new tactics to learn,4 as Kevin had to retrain on how to tack with the Finn’s low, square boom (putting the bow of the boat into the eye of the wind) and gybe (putting the stern of the boat into the eye of the wind), and had to remember that downwind, not upwind, was where the bold maneuvering lay with the Finn.5 The harder one pushed, the faster the boat could go, but the greater the likelihood of crashing.

  Kevin spent his weeks in Fort Lauderdale completely consumed by preparing for the competition. He lived in a tiny apartment across the street from where the trials race would take place. If he wasn’t at the gym, he was on the water or asleep. It helped that some of his former teammates were also in the area, providing a built-in social and support network, helping him find everything from a coach boat to an apartment to a gym.

  Kevin knew that his weakness in previous competitions hadn’t been to start on the upwind, uphill climb (that was mostly about strength and risk management), but sailing downwind in the second half of the race. Then he had lost confidence and tightened up, his finishes weak compared to his forceful starts.6 The other boats had torn by him and beat him to the finish line as his hopes sank to the bottom of the water like an anvil.

  Now, to practice his downwind technique, Kevin sailed the thirty-mile stretch between Miami and Fort L
auderdale nearly a dozen times, his route chosen by the direction of the wind over impossibly blue waters bordering the cities’ playful skylines and shores. In his lower moments, which he didn’t share with anyone at the time, he thought of himself alone on a 16-foot boat, and if he were to crash, he would be swept to the sea by the Gulfstream current and never seen again.

  When the trials began in Fort Lauderdale in February, roughly six months before the Athens Games, Kevin’s entire family, including his divorced parents, assembled to watch his fourth attempt for a spot on the U.S. team.

  All of them were unaware that he had gone off his bipolar medications. He had been so steady and methodically committed to training, they hadn’t even thought to ask him about it. Kevin was doing some of the best sailing of his life and nobody wanted to risk throwing him off when, by all outward indications, he was hitting a rhythm on land and sea.

  Kevin, who often maintained that his meds dulled his sailing abilities, had decided to go off them four months before, in spite of knowing the risks involved. Everything from his balance to his reflexes to his vision (literal and metaphorical) was thrown off when he was on them, he said. He once described sailing while medicated like “trying to use a mouse that’s turned sideways on your desk. You can do it, you can learn, but you will never, ever get your high score on Missile Command unless you were born with a sideways mouse in the first place.”7 He knew that this could be his last shot for the Olympics that his friends and family would support him in, as, understandably, their patience was wearing thin after they had already demonstrated incredible generosity and support. The way Kevin saw it, he couldn’t risk taking his medication, even though he was well aware of the potential for tumult that loomed whenever he saw the plastic bottle collecting dust in his medicine cabinet.

  GORDON

  It was strange to think that his son was getting too old for anything, let alone sailing. Because, of course, admitting that Kevin was getting old was tacit admission that he, too, as his father, was aging. Kevin was now thirty-four, old by most Olympic standards, yet Gordon was still supportive, albeit a bit skeptical, of his son’s ability to make the team in the Finn class.

  During the trials, Gordon stood with Amanda and Susanne on board the boat of a local yacht club member and watched in awe as Kevin ran away with the regatta. It was some of the most inspired sailing Gordon had ever seen from anyone, not just his son. Kevin was so far ahead in the trials by the last day that he didn’t even need to compete, having already secured his berth by a wide margin, though he decided to go out anyway, as big of a show of the love of the sport8 as he had ever seen in his son.

  Gordon was the first to tell his son that his win was a huge accomplishment. After all those years spent driving him around the junior circuit and helping him deal with cancer treatments, all the times he had bailed Kevin out of the aftermath of being on The Show, Gordon felt an immense sense of pride in his son. Kevin had set a goal and he had reached it. He was an Olympian.

  The next stop was the podium in Athens.

  AMANDA

  As Kevin and Amanda sat in the sperm clinic flipping through profiles of donors, they couldn’t help but chuckle.9 One donor described how he wanted to make a “pungent” difference in the world. Another, when asked if he liked animals, responded simply, “Yes, ducks.”10

  Amanda and Kevin had talked about wanting a family early in their reconciliation, Kevin’s testicular cancer having brought the conversation to the forefront, but they were unclear on how exactly to start one. They had already applied to and been accepted by an adoption organization and paid a significant sum to an expectant mother they had met with through the group. But the mother took the money and did not follow through with the adoption, a painful setback to Kevin and Amanda in their first attempt at trying to build a family. They still loved the idea of adoption, and hadn’t ruled it out, but Amanda was also curious about the experience of being pregnant.

  They saw no harm in trying to get both processes going simultaneously, knowing that both, even under the best of circumstances, would take some time.

  Amanda saw one profile that didn’t actually look too bad.

  What did Kevin think?

  KEVIN

  Kevin later described sitting in the sperm bank clinic browsing through the profiles of potential biological fathers for his children as “one of the most unsettling spiritual experiences I have ever had.”

  He was torn between the joyful idea of finally starting a family and the peculiar feeling that some other man would be impregnating his wife. He worried that a sperm donor child would feel more like Amanda’s than his, that a bond would form between them and that he wouldn’t or couldn’t ever catch up. He also understood why Amanda wanted the experience of pregnancy and wanted to be a fair partner.11

  Here he was, an Olympian (finally) and professional athlete, filling out paperwork saying that for him, biological procreation was impossible. “It seems so primal, and human, and part of the cycle of life and yadda yadda in a reverent way,” Kevin later wrote. “It seemed like it would be very easy to end up with regrets or resentment, if we didn’t try to get pregnant.”

  Kevin also thought about his “old, reptilian part of the brain” and what he called his “Me Tarzan, you Jane” male instincts. He knew those impulses were evolutionary throwbacks, but that recognition didn’t necessarily mean that it was easy to shake them in the moment.

  He and Amanda selected vial #3606, a number that would remain printed in his brain permanently.

  They waited.

  •

  Another sperm-related issue loomed, this one far more public: Kevin’s dispute over his testosterone shots with the International Olympic Committee. Since he had failed to make the Atlanta 1996 or Sydney 2000 Games, the matter of his taking the injections had never been resolved. Five weeks before the opening ceremonies in Athens, he found himself in the same position he’d been in years earlier, trying to get what anti-doping experts now officially called a Therapeutic Use Exemption waiver, the whole frustrating fracas revived. He dusted off a thick file folder he had labeled THE HASSLE.

  The waiver process was designed in a sometimes haphazard fashion for athletes who had illnesses or medical conditions that required them to take a medication that was on the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) banned substance list. WADA had just recently been formed; what little drug testing had been done earlier was conducted by the IOC. Some common cases that had come up12 so far involved asthma, cardiovascular issues, and transgender athletes who said they had to take hormones. To apply for the waiver, an athlete, in consultation with a doctor, had to fill out an application describing the relevant condition and necessary medications, then submit the application to the anti-doping authorities, who then reviewed the case.

  Kevin had a hard time believing that after all he had been through—two bouts with cancer, three failed attempts at qualifying for the Olympics, a divorce, and several manic episodes and depressive aftermaths—the fine print scribed by the international sports bureaucracy was going to stop him.

  Several years into his testosterone shots, Kevin had become accustomed to needles and blood work. Still, he resented being required by anti-doping officials to head to a laboratory to give even more blood—at precisely the same time he was scheduled to be in Athens for workouts ahead of the Games.

  Not only that, Kevin, like all Olympic athletes, had to report his minute-by-minute whereabouts to anti-doping officials. The idea was to make drug testing more effective by making it spontaneous, because if an athlete knew that a drug test was looming, it would be easy for him or her to dilute urine of a banned substance in plenty of time beforehand. While randomness increased accuracy, it also made for some odd moments, as drug testers could knock on doors at any hour and interrupt practices, family gatherings, or dates. For Kevin, the anti-doping protocol blurred the boundary between The Show and reality; now, as cameras and newspapers followed his saga, he actually was being watched by a large,
bureaucratic organization that was global in scope and ambition. And they had permission to show up in his life at any time.

  Immediately following his triumph at the trials, Kevin had gone back on his medication for his bipolar disorder and stayed on it. He had flirted with the idea of going off it in Athens, but had fought against that desire. What everyone around him seemed not to understand was that with his meds, he felt like he was living his life inside parentheses.

  AMANDA

  In early July 2004, with just a little over a month before the Olympic opening ceremonies, Kevin had still received only part of his waiver to compete in the Games. Under the Therapeutic Use Exemption guidelines, Kevin and Amanda were told that Kevin now needed an “independent referee” to review his case. Considering that Kevin had first broached the subject of his testosterone shots nearly a decade prior to Olympic competition, it was agonizing to be so close to the Games without formal approval. Amanda and Kevin had also heard that an adjudicator who had been tasked with reviewing his case had accidentally seen Kevin’s name on one of the documents, meaning that a second one had to be chosen and the review started all over again. U.S. Sailing, the national governing body that had backed Kevin, declined to speak publicly about his case, citing confidentiality rules.

  That was it for Amanda. She wrote a letter and blasted it out13 to members of the media: “Kevin has endured logistically challenging mandated blood tests, tedious and repetitive paperwork demands, inconsistent and contradictory stipulations on his time, his energy and his patience,” she wrote, “all the while keeping a smile on for the press, keeping his optimism alive, and with little moral support and advocacy from the very organizations established for those purposes.”

  She added that in nine years of testing, Kevin had not once shown an elevated testosterone level and had “not once asked for anything more than fair and equal treatment. As far as I am concerned this is the last straw in a long line of stalling techniques that amount to a spit in his face.”