Commitment, passion, performance, countless hours of training:
These are just a few of the things our dreams are made of.
We are Cirque du Soleil artists, and we all have a story to tell.
Behind the scenes, behind the makeup and all the costumes,
this is unfiltered, raw, like you’ve never seen before.
Welcome to Cirque Stories.
Hi, I’m Christina Jones, and I’m your host for Cirque Stories.
I’m a synchronized swimmer
in Cirque du Soleil’s production, O, at the Bellagio.
My synchronized swimming career before
I got to Cirque included competing in the 2008 Olympic Games
and winning World Championships with my duet partner, Bill May.
I really realized that I was done competing with synchronized swimming,
I was done with such structure,
and I wanted to express myself as an artist,
and Cirque du Soleil was a perfect avenue for this.
I got to explore a whole new side of my sport that I had never seen before.
Competitive synchronized swimming is extremely regimented and precise,
and after nearly 15 years of it,
I needed to let my hair down.
While some of that same precision is important at O,
there’s way more room for creativity, exploration and artistic growth.
A lot of my synchro idols had joined Cirque after their competitive careers,
and I always knew I wanted to follow in their footsteps.
In 2007, my Olympic team had a training camp in Vegas,
and I finally got a chance to see O.
That confirmed it;
I knew that I wanted to perform on that stage one day.
At first, I had a hard time adjusting
to the nocturnal schedule of a circus performer,
but then I realized we have virtually our entire day free.
I decided to put myself through school and attend classes during the day,
while doing ten shows a week at night.
My story has been told time and time again.
It’s always sugar-coated; it just portrays this fake reality
that everything is roses and sunshine all the time and,
while the Olympics were fantastic, they were a huge highlight of my life,
I feel that the true story hasn’t really been told yet—
the story behind the scenes.
I want these stories to be real, unfiltered and raw.
As I started to look around backstage and talk to my friends with Cirque,
I started to realize how incredible everyone’s stories really are.
I realized that this is what I need to be doing.
I need to be sharing these stories with the world.
We are Cirque performers, and every night we perform for you.
We make you laugh, we make you cry, we entertain you.
But behind the makeup and the costumes
and all the masks and everything you see,
each of us has an individual story to tell.
We wanted to invite you behind the scenes, behind the curtain,
to see what really goes on backstage,
what really goes on in life before we show up at work to entertain you.
Last year, my life threw a huge surprise at me.
I thought I was done with competitive synchronized swimming,
but it turns out I wasn’t.
A new event, called the mixed duet,
was added to the Fina World Championships,
and a mixed duet is when a man and a woman swim together.
Announcer: Huge moment for the Americans in particular,
Bill May, and Christina Jones.
Up until last year, men were banned
from elite competitions of synchronized swimming.
And it turns out that I got paired with
one of my very best friends, Bill May.
And we had a pretty incredible experience together,
and I decided to bring him here to help tell that story a little bit,
and I think that through talking with him,
you’ll be able to see a little bit of who I am,
and how Bill and I work together.
Not only have I known Bill since I was 10,
but now we get to perform together for Cirque.
- Take one. - Woohoo!
- Here we go.
- Everybody sees the fame and glory, and just, like,
the final moment of a lot of hard work when you watch sporting events,
when you watch the Olympics, World Championships, whatever it is.
But they don’t really see what goes on behind the scenes.
And I just really wanted us to have a chance to share with people
what it’s like to prepare for such a huge event.
- That whole journey from start to finish…
You know, you have so many ups and downs that people don’t see,
and I think it is nice for people to see the hard work that goes into it,
and just how difficult it is to really go after, you know…
You don’t get breaks, you don’t have time for your friends,
you don’t have time for your family,
you don’t have time to do your laundry.
- Yeah, I think the sacrifice,
the sacrifice is something that people just don’t understand.
Like, you moved from New York to California just to train.
You left your family when you were 16 to do that, and
I home-schooled the last couple years of high school just because I was
leaving home at 4:30 in the morning,
driving across the bay area to do weights
and train and workout at Stanford University.
Then I would go to high school, go do a full day of high school,
and then I would train, 3 to 9:30 p.m., and
barely be able to get my homework done,
and then wake up at 4:30 again and do it all over.
And my parents just realized, it’s crazy, and
you either have a chance to train for your Olympic dream,
or you can have a normal teenage life, and I chose to go for it.
Some people say, “Oh my gosh, synchronized swimming, that’s amazing!”
But like, that’s really one of my callings, I think.
Like, I think people need to know the effort that we put in
and how difficult what we do really is,
because when you compare our training to other sports, it’s insane.
Well you know I think, in that aspect,
I think if there’s somehow that we can use that as a challenge
—you know, people don’t know the sport or they don’t understand the sport—
to somehow, kind of,
you know, make them realize or
express to them or invite them into our world,
I think that could be something that we could really use
to showcase synchronized swimming as more of an athletic sport
and just get a little bit more respect
- Yeah. - from people, because
I think people do say, you know, like it’s floating in the water,
it’s not this, and I think that just comes from, one,
not getting enough media
- Yeah. - for the sport,
and two, just people, they’ve never tried it.
You know, and we would train, when we were training,
we could train up to 10 hours a day, and not even blink.
- 10 hours in the water, without touching the side of the pool,
Not touching the side, you’re not touching the bottom,
you’re using every piece of energy in your body to hold yourself up.
People really don’t understand the difficulty that the sport entails.
- And I even get surprised,
like I retired from synchronized swimming in 2008,
retired again in 2010,
and as we know,
- Retired again in 2015 - again last year,
and I know how hard it is, I know how much goes into this sport,
and even I couldn’t believe how much it hurt
physically last year. Like it hurts so bad.
- Well I think again, you know, you’re using your entire body
to hold yourself up.
You know, so there’s not one part of your body that you can ever rest,
- Yeah. - you know, like, you’re always engaged.
- Yeah. - So people don’t understand that.
You know, just have anyone go try to tread water in a pool.
- And don’t breathe; you’re oxygen deprived, too.
- Exactly. Now take the breath away.
And people, they,
they can’t, even ask them to do their own sport and just not breathe.
- Yeah.
- You know, and they’re gonna get a little glimpse of what it is
to be a synchronized swimmer.
And now take away their ability to stand on something.
- Yeah.
- And you’re supposed to not show people that this is hurting.
- Well maybe that little cut I gave you at Worlds
helped people know how.
- Well, when you jabbed my eye out.
- He dove in first, last year, and then I dove in after him,
and I like, sliced his eye,
my hand went like that, and he was bleeding.
And that’s the other thing about synchronized swimming is that
when you’re coming at me full speed,
you know it’s like a car coming at you,
- Thanks - but it’s behind a blur.
It’s like a tank just running down, like, an army.
- For both of us, I think it’s safe to say that
the moment that we won in Kazan was a pretty amazing moment.
- Oh, yeah.
- And we don’t really ever talk about it, the two of us,
because we both just kind of know.
- Well, I mean, I think even now, goose bumps,
- Yeah. - because it was the first time
that something like that happened, so it was like this whole,
like, mound of energy just came together,
because we both had so much support,
and you know, it took an army for this to happen.
Because we were working full time, training full time,
you know, and going against the odds of people that have been swimming,
you know, constantly for the past 10 years,
where we had not swum for 10 years.
You know, so to be part of such a historical event,
as well as payoff of all of the hard work that we have done
and that other people have done with us, you know,
that whole accumulation of support
just kind of was a top-off by winning that gold medal.
You know, we were swimming from our heart,
and that’s all that we could ask for.
You know, and it paid off,
- Yeah.
- so we walked away as a first world champions,
you know, in the mixed duet event.
- Yeah.
I remember asking you, like,
“Did we… Did we just win? Is that?”
You’re like, “Yeah.” Like, I couldn’t really even believe it,
and I think a really special moment
was looking over and seeing our coach, Chris Carver,
and our other teammate, Kristina Lum Underwood.
It was like, it looked they had been just, like,
crying forever, like, they had tears down their face.
- You know, Chris has coached and coached and coached,
but this is something that she created.
- We both desperately want everything to be so incredibly perfect.
Like, we both think that we’re 100% right,
- All of the time - and like,
it just took you a while to learn, like,
I’m always right, you know.
- It took you a while to learn that I’m stubborn.
- We did have those moments where we would kind of, you know,
clash, because
we both wanted the same thing,
but it wasn’t always just sunshine and roses and laughter.
I mean, it was, there were some really, really challenging days,
really hard days.
- Yeah. But I think, you know, that’s what happens
when two people love each other so much is that,
you know, the high points are even higher and the low points are lower,
- Yeah, for sure
- and it’s because you do care so much about each other,
and we cared so much about our goal that, you know, of course,
that fighting was gonna happen, and it was only going to make us stronger.
- Yeah. - And I think,
you know, in fighting with each other, it brought that fight
that we were to show the world as a force as one.
- All right let’s do it.
If you had no worries,
all the money in the world, no bills to pay,
no health concerns, no responsibilities,
no problems,
what would you do?
- I think I’m drawn to people that are the underdogs.
You now, because that’s something in my life that I’ve had to deal with.
So I think something that I could give to a child
and make them realize that no matter how hard or difficult they have it,
you know, there’s always a smile,
and there’s always something that’s gonna be better for them.
- I think that I would travel.
I love travelling. I just got back from Cuba.
It was an amazing experience.
I backpacked throughout Southeast Asia after the Olympics.
I love seeing people all over the world.
I would try to just share people’s stories for who they are,
not for who society thinks that they should be,
or what people think of who they are,
or what they stand for, or what they believe in, or what they look like.
I would just want to share stories
of people all around the world for who they are.
- Awesome.
Hi! Thanks for watching this episode of Cirque Stories!
I hope you enjoyed watching it as much as I did shooting it.
But as always, I would love to hear from you.
Which Cirque artist would you like me to interview next?
And remember, you can always catch me on stage as the cast and crew of "O"
at the Bellagio on the Las Vegas Strip.
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