When it’s sink or swim, these men keep it light
It’s early in the documentary Men Who Swim when the stars of the film, the members of a men’s synchronized swimming team in Stockholm, get an introductory once-over from a prospective mentor.
Coach Jane is conversant with the Olympic version of the sport, currently the exclusive domain of highly trained young women reliant on gobs of worldclass athleticism and waterproof eye makeup. Her would-be charges resemble nothing of the sort. They are a dozen or so 40-something schleps exponentially more focused on the thought of a post-swim trip to the pub than on stepping atop an Olympic podium.
Says Coach Jane, rounding up the group after her first in-pool assessment: “Unfortunately, you’re not very good at floating.”
Fundamental athletic gifts, of course, have never been a requisite of the recreational sports enthusiast. And therein lies much of the charm of Men Who
Swim, which screened Friday night at the Bell Lightbox on King St. as part of the fourth annual Canadian Sport Film Festival. A movie about swimmers who can’t float? The world’s beer leagues are filled with hockey enthusiasts who can’t skate, footballers with stone feet, hoopsters with no game. Surely the world will survive without high-definition camera footage of the carnage.
The difference is that these Swedes, the Stockholm Art Swim Gents, are armed with more charisma and quirkiness than your average gaggle of Thursday-night dabblers. They’re media darlings in their home country. They’re regular performers at Stockholm’s Popaganda rock music festival (where the 2011 headliner was Canada’s Arcade Fire). And while their novelty factor remains high, they’ve come to find out they’re hardly alone in the world.
There are men’s synchronized swimming teams competing in most corners of the planet. Sporting historians will point out that, while women have been the sport’s only Olympic purveyors since it became a Games fixture in 1984, it was once, in its nascent days in the late 1800s, the domain of men.
“We sort of reinvented the sport in a way,” said Henrik Lundgren, one of the Gents, speaking over the phone from Stockholm this week. “There’s something about the whole thing — middleaged men doing this — it’s become funny, even if we are doing it very seriously. And we are doing it very seriously. Otherwise we would be clowns or something. . . . We realize if we don’t do this seriously, it’s going to be very disrespectful to the women who do this and are much, much better than we are.”
The film is, in part, about perseverance in the face of futility. The group’s early performances are less than uplifting. There’s a scene in which one of the members, perhaps under the influence of post-swim refreshments, laments that “90 per cent of this team is bloody useless.”
They’re bloody humorous, to be sure. They psych themselves up by singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and its chorus of “Glory, glory, hallelujah!” They share nips from a bottle of whiskey in the shower. They fray the nerves of those around them.
“One needs patience,” concedes Coach Jane, “and I really don’t have any.”
Certainly Dylan Williams, a member of the team, was running out of patience with his stalling film career when he pitched the picture to a group of film-industry power-brokers.
“I basically got up in front of about 200 people and said, ‘I’m almost 40 and all I’ve got to show for it is that I’m a male synchronized swimmer,’ ” Williams said in an interview. “It was genuine. It was, ‘I don’t really know what I’m doing in my life.’ ”
The film has been shown in cinemas in five countries and been seen in festivals in many more. As for the Gents, in the time since the film wrapped they’ve won international competitions, begun scouting for new members and commenced plotting an epic 10th anniversary show for next year.
Williams has likened his time with his friends in the pool to an antidote to a low-grade mid-life crisis. “My HarleyDavidson,” he has called it.
But don’t expect an impending push for, say, inclusion in an upcoming Olympics.
“We are not athletes in any way,” said Williams. “When we started, the women’s clubs weren’t interested and thought we were out to ridicule them. But we’ve always tried our best. . . . We don’t do synchronized swimming as women do it. We do something different. We have tried to do what women do, but it’s very, very hard. As you see in the film, we’re not that good.”