by Mary Pilon
The last night they were together in Athens, Kevin and his family went out for a farewell dinner. As a child, Kevin and his father had always engaged in post-race dissections, breaking down the details of how Kevin had handled each turn, each shift of the wind, each decision, but the idea of a recap, even if it was constructive in intention and academic in tone, now, the ritual was too painful. Honestly, Kevin thought, he wasn’t even sure his father had watched his race, and Kevin didn’t want to ask, let alone get tedious notes about what he had done right or wrong on the world’s biggest stage.
If there was an upside to the post-Olympic funk, it was that Kevin had a good job waiting for him and little time in which to sulk. He would be joining Team New Zealand in its America’s Cup bid. Before going home, though, he and Amanda would take a vacation in Italy, during which he drank heavily and she, expecting a child, abstained. They slept late, lounged by the pool, and read mediocre celebrity magazines, a welcome decompression.
AMANDA
They had been away from home for only a few weeks, but it had felt like years. The Olympics were over, and now she and Kevin were in Maryland with a $20,000 debt to show for it.26 Fortunately, with Team New Zealand putting Kevin on a retainer for its next America’s Cup bid, that debt could soon be erased.
Amanda was impressed that Kevin had been able to pull off life as a well-paid professional sailor during all of the years they’d been married, especially since the opportunity hadn’t really existed even a decade ago. At least on that front, Kevin had been, and still was, in the right place at the right time, as there was a niche demand for the incredibly specific skill set that he offered.
Shortly after their return home, Amanda and Kevin waited in the doctor’s office for a baby checkup, which would include an ultrasound.
Within seconds of the test starting, Amanda knew.
They had lost the baby.
KRISTINA
A few weeks after Kristina and Bud were engaged, she was pregnant. She loved the idea of being a mother, but not long after she gave birth, the panic attacks came and came swiftly. She and Bud had started a postal supply and shipping business, which was causing stress for both of them, and she felt devastated by the sudden death of her stepfather, Ted. Kristina thought that somehow, strangely, between the timing of his death and her pregnancy, it felt as if Ted’s spirit had been transferred into that of her new son.
One perk of having a doctor for a sister-in-law was being a phone call away from any diagnosis. She called Amanda and described her symptoms: the shortness of breath, the stress, the overwhelmed feeling in her head. They’re probably panic attacks, Amanda told her.
Kristina’s mind raced back to her bad mushroom trip and near-death experience at Disneyland more than a decade prior, and had similar thoughts to what she had had then. She couldn’t go nuts, she couldn’t fall apart. She was the family moderator. They needed her.27
AMANDA
On paper, Kevin and Amanda looked like perfect candidates for adoption. A few years into marriage and more than a decade into knowing each other, they had a six-figure household income, a robust network of friends and family, and a compelling backstory as to why they couldn’t conceive children on their own. Both she and Kevin hailed from “square” families of two parents and two kids, and early on they had decided that they wanted the bustle and energy of having a family of their own, perhaps with as many as three children. Although they often had to move with the sailing season, they had the resources to accommodate a family wherever Kevin’s boat assignment took them. It was an unorthodox lifestyle,28 but one that most of the adoption agencies they spoke to seemed willing to accommodate.
Amanda and Kevin weighed whether or not to disclose Kevin’s bipolar disorder to adoption agencies. If they did, they risked not getting the child they so desperately wanted, but they feared that if they withheld the information and the agency found out about it later through other means, their credibility would be lost.
After some discussion, they decided to disclose Kevin’s diagnosis. At the same time, they also pointed out that he was in excellent care, healthy, and committed to staying mentally sound. What’s more, it had been a while since his most recent episode. They waited.
In late 2004, they received word that they had been approved to adopt a little boy. The news was thrilling, particularly after their first attempt at adoption resulted in financial loss and emotional pain, but like many adoptive parents, Kevin and Amanda began to worry that their application could be discarded, a birth parent might change his or her mind, or something else would go wrong in the process. Nothing felt certain until they met with the six-month pregnant mother, who lived in Long Island, New York, and agreed to an open adoption, meaning that biological and adoptive families have some contact. On New Year’s Eve 2004, Amanda and Kevin welcomed Rainer, named after one of their favorite poets, Austrian-Bohemian Rainer Maria Rilke, into their family. Now they had an adorable, cooing little person to remind them of the poet whose words had sprinkled so many of their love letters in earlier years.
The following year, Kevin and Amanda bought a home in Auckland, a city they had been in and out of for five years, eager to finally be planted somewhere for a while. Their home in the Ponsonby neighborhood had enough bedrooms to accommodate the large family they wanted to build and also ensured that Kevin would always be near the best sailing facilities in the world. Amanda found work in an emergency room in the area and had less hassle with malpractice insurance than she would have had in the United States. Auckland was beautiful, clean, warm, and one of the most livable places on earth.
The transition seemed to go smoothly for Kevin, who during his first year there had only one minor episode when some red wine had “unlocked” more of his brain than he had intended. It ended with Kevin visiting the psych ward29 to get some more medication and having to stay the night. He and Amanda both saw it as progress that they had been able to control and react to the early symptoms of The Show before total mayhem erupted.
A year later, a second boy, Leo, arrived in the Hall household, also an open adoption from a different mother in upstate New York, and named after Leo Robbins, one of Kevin’s first sailing coaches. Kevin debated how or even whether he should make a bid for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, arriving at the Team New Zealand gym at 5:15 a.m., an hour earlier each morning, to do extra leg and abdominal workouts for the Finn class.30 But after much painful stewing, he realized that making a hard push for Beijing, with his new duties in the America’s Cup and as a father, would be extremely difficult. Tears came as he reconciled the two dimensions of what he saw as failure with the success of starting a family.31
Having made an Olympic team, Kevin was faced with the awkward, though often well-intended, question from strangers and acquaintances, “How did you do?” The vast majority of Olympians, by definition, did not win, a harsh reality that is not seen on television but can fill the Olympic Park with a sense of malaise as the calendar of events rolls on. The grounds fill up with people who feel like they’re losers and the test to one’s psyche upon returning home in the shadow of one of the world’s strictest achievement models, can be nothing short of taxing.32 All sense of context is completely lost on most athletes, as well as many friends and family members. Who is eleventh-best at anything in the world? Or even one of the fifty best people? How is it that so many of those who make it into such an elite pool to begin with end up leaving feeling like failures?
Kevin sometimes wondered whether if he had completely tanked in Athens, like finishing in last place or close to it, that would have made it easier. In that scenario, he would have been so far from the podium that his sense of entitlement in being there would have been nonexistent.
Years later, it felt bizarre to not be either a winner or an outright loser: the strange, overlooked psyche of a middle-of-the-pack Olympian.
SARAH
Even though it had been nearly a decade since Sarah O’Kane had first met many of the sailors on the Am
ericaOne campaign, she still saw them as Peter Pans. They never seemed to grow up, boys trapped in the bodies of athletic men. But if they were Peter Pans, traversing the professional sailing circuit as though it was some sort of Neverland, Sarah knew that that must make her Wendy. As she continued to grow into her role as the head of the team’s logistics, she was something of a mother-away-from-mother to all of them, a caretaker, a confidante, and a boss with a smile, long blonde hair, and a soft British accent.
Sardinia, with its turquoise waters, pink sand beaches and inviting temperatures, was chosen to be the site of a 2008 Audi MedCup regatta, the world’s premiere Grand Prix sailing circuit. The event featured many of the same sailors as the Olympics and the America’s Cup, and like the America’s Cup, its team rosters were constantly being reshuffled each cycle, with new team combinations popping up at each event.
In professional sailing, as in Olympic sailing, all distractions that pulled the sailors away from the boat were supposed to be eliminated. As that dimension of the sport grew and more money entered the campaigns, the stakes for the athletes naturally became higher. The athletes were told where, when, and what to eat and what hotels to stay at. They were handed their boarding passes for planes, and their collective schedule was sliced like a loaf of bread33 into distinct, specific parts. Their sole focus was to figure out how to make their boat go as fast as possible.
Over the years, Sarah had gotten to know the spouses of sailors, too, and the dynamics of their relationships with their husbands. She had observed that in general, the men on the boat were good partners, but they often paired best with those who could take charge. The sailors were loving, caring, fun to be around, engineering mavens, and many boasted handsome salaries and an arsenal of medals and trophies. But when it came to laundry, cooking, cleaning, or talking feelings, they could be utterly hopeless.
The Mean Machine, headed up by Kiwi Ray Davies, had performed well in the Sardinia Regatta, helping move them up prestigious circuit standings.34
A celebration was well earned. Wearing sleek sunglasses, matching gray T-shirts, and black shorts, Kevin, Ray, and the rest of the team popped open bottles of champagne and proceeded to spray each other. A victory party on a docked boat followed later that night, with Kevin among the most enthusiastic of those present, sipping rum and Cokes instead of his usual beer.35 Then, Sarah observed something that the other revelers probably shrugged off as merely drunken behavior. Yet Sarah, recalling her experience with Kevin back in New Zealand years earlier, knew better. Kevin had taken off his Olympic watch,36 pulled his wallet out of his pocket, and chucked both items overboard. He did keep his shoes on, though, unlike several earlier episodes in which he had taken them off to be closer to the earth.37
Immediately, Sarah began circling around Kevin’s teammates, telling them that she needed their help. The memory of seeing Kevin moonwalking down the street in Auckland with his Discman played in the back of her head. He had seemed fine earlier in the day, and during the stellar competition, but that was clearly not the case now.
•
Flanked by his teammates, Kevin walked back to the hotel. He kept asking if they could go out for another drink, if they could just keep celebrating, and he spouted off to anyone who would listen about the meaning of life, trying to save the universe, his place in it. His mood jolted back and forth from euphoric to desperate, and he was on the verge of tears in either direction, with a rickety bridge of sarcasm in between.
As his mind ricocheted, he thought he tripped over a couple of things on the sidewalk and could have sworn that he saw a bull roaming the streets. Then he spied a large cactus. The sight of it captivated him and become the focus of every ounce of his concentration, again lyrics from R.E.M. coming to mind (“I am a cactus/Trying to be a canoe”38). He lunged for it, and before his teammates could pull him away, Kevin had already wrapped his arms around the cactus. It was necessary, he said, to give the prickly plant “a hug.”
Kevin’s teammates peeled him off the plant, his shirt now specked with dots of blood from where the needles had pricked his skin through the cotton of his T-shirt. Then they made their way up to his hotel room.
As the men searched for Kevin’s downers and tried to occupy his wandering mind, Sarah walked out into the hallway of the hotel. She knew that she had to get in touch with Amanda as soon as possible. Making sure that Kevin couldn’t hear her, she punched in Amanda’s number and told her what had happened. Calmly, Amanda told her where the medications were stowed in Kevin’s luggage.39
If they were really lucky, Amanda said, they might be able to get Kevin to take a sleeping pill. It was unlikely, but if that was the case, he could get through the worst of it, the downers kicking in and pushing him to sleep until the next morning. Complicating matters was the fact that both the uppers and the downers Kevin had at the time were purple, meaning that he alone would have to help them figure out which were which.
The team was supposed to leave Sardinia the next day, and it was unclear to the sailors what the implications of Kevin’s being hospitalized in Italy would be. How long would they keep him? What would the treatment be like? How would Amanda, with their two young sons far beyond Italy’s borders, be able to retrieve him once he was out? They had to get him calm enough to fly back to Amanda in New York, where she was with family for the summer, a journey with a couple of major legs that Kevin would have to complete solo.
Meanwhile, in the hotel room, his teammate Ray talked to Kevin, who by now was sitting on his bed with his laptop splayed open and on top of his head, like the roof of an A-frame house, Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb”40 emanating from the speakers. The references in the lyrics to a distant ship, waves, and being without pain all seemed perfect for the moment.
Sarah approached Kevin, night now turning into morning, about taking a sleeping pill. To her surprise, he identified what he said were the proper downers, agreed to take them, and seemed amenable to the idea of one of Kevin’s teammates, Tommy Dodson, agreeing to reroute and fly to Rome, where Kevin would get on a plane to New York alone and Tommy would head back to Auckland. The meds were in Kevin’s system, but it was anyone’s guess how long it would take,41 or how effective, the drugs would be.
Nor did it help that the Pink Floyd blaring in the room included a line about “going to The Show.”
KEVIN
Kevin couldn’t remember what sentence it was or whose mouth it came out of, but he did remember feeling, within seconds, as if he had gone from partying on the boat to being on The Show.42 Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 came to mind, coupled with the notion of being uncomfortable in one’s skin. In the book, Oedipa Maas, the protagonist, discovers and begins to unravel a world conspiracy that may or may not be real. “ ‘I came,’ she said, ‘hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy.’ ‘Cherish it!’ cried Hilarious, fiercely. ‘What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by its little tentacle, don’t let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be.’ ”
To Kevin, the Sardinia episode had a similar feeling, as if it was some kind of practical joke. Sure, his teammates had tried to calm him down with arguments about the meaning of life. But that was part of The Show, as they were actors, too, and had been training their whole lives to know Kevin, his mission, and their role in it.43 “Shall I project a world?” Pynchon wrote.
Although the sailing press had been brimming with positive coverage about the Mean Machine performance, Kevin privately wasn’t satisfied with his own personal performance. He felt that he had made a few bad calls,44 and he felt the pressure of a larger stress, too: he was uncertain of his place in the America’s Cup circuit, and having put in what he had perceived as a mediocre individual contribution in Sardinia wouldn’t help his case.
Still, it was time to head home and see which elements of the episode awaited him there. At the counter for custo
ms with Tommy, Kevin listed his address as Auckland, Planet Earth, The Universe.45 During the layover in Rome, he purchased for Amanda what he believed to be the most expensive Gucci bag available as a gift. He had wanted to buy three more, just to make sure she had options that she liked, but Tommy persuaded him that just one would suffice. This was among Kevin’s most expensive souvenirs from The Show, and it only made sense, he thought, that his wife, the leading lady, should be treated to the finest of brand-name possessions.
Often, during other episodes, Kevin had opted to save twigs, pages torn from magazines, bottle caps, and collages of nonsense that he perceived as works of art. At least once during an episode, too, he had filled his pockets with breadcrumbs, the way a child collects shells at a beach, mementos of euphoria. Usually, after Kevin came down, he studied the objects he had collected, wondering why he had thought they were once so laced with significance, confronted with tangible evidence of a version of him that he no longer recognized.46 Occasionally he made grandiose purchases that were just as inconsistent, then had to barter with store clerks and credit card companies about how to procure a refund.
Near a men’s restroom in the airport, Kevin noticed a plastic plaque on the wall that appeared to be precisely the same size as his thirteen-inch MacBook laptop. That must be some kind of port of significance.47 He stopped and placed his laptop against the plaque. Tommy chuckled, then gently escorted him onto the plane.
Later, back home and well after Kevin had cooled down, he felt amazed that Tommy had been able to get him on the plane to New York and Kevin had kept himself entertained, but essentially in his seat, the entire flight back across the Atlantic. He wasn’t sure how he had done it.48
Amanda maintained that she actually liked the Gucci bag.49
AMANDA
Kevin and Amanda had traveled to Russia before for various sailing events, and Amanda considered herself a bit of a Russophile, as she had long been taken with the country’s distinctive accent, layered history, and curious customs. Russia was also their best shot50 at the time for adopting a girl.
