THE PRICE OF OLYMPIC DREAMS

Megumi Field and her father, Whitman, were driving to her artistic swimming practice one day when he offered her some trail mix with cashews, neither thinking anything of it. They weren’t far from the Freedom Valley Swim Club — it’s now the Phoenixville YMCA — when she ate the handful of oats and berries and nuts. The snack would be a nice and necessary pick-me-up after a long ride; the Fields lived in Wilmington at the time, and their commute to the club was more than an hour each way.

Her parents had instilled in her the belief that hard work was how an elite athlete separated herself from other elite athletes, and her willingness to ride out the reaction proved, at least to herself, that she was a hard worker. What was most important to her that day at the club was that, even if she wasn’t in perfect health, she would get at least some practice time in.

Finally, Jennifer Hatt, the team’s coach, asked her if she felt all right.

“I think I’ll be fine,” Megumi said. She continued honing her routines for a few minutes, but Hatt stopped her again and put her hand on her arm. Megumi’s skin was hot to the touch.

“You really don’t look good,” Hatt said.

Hatt and another coach called Whitman to have him rush Megumi to the nearest emergency room. She climbed into the back of the car.

“If you can’t breathe and you start to feel like your throat’s closing up,” Whitman told his daughter as they drove to the hospital, “tap on the window really loud.”

“If I can’t breathe,” she said, “how am I going to tap on the window?”

At the ER, doctors gave her Benadryl, and her symptoms subsided. OK, she thought, this was very anticlimactic. This was 2015. She was 9 years old.

Artistic swimming — synchronized swimming, as it used to be known, or just synchro, the shorthand that many in the sport still use — has been spoofed so memorably in American pop culture that it’s trite even to mention those parodies. Remember the caddies dancing to Tchaikovsky’s “Waltz of the Flowers” in the Bushwood Country Club pool? Of course you do. Have you seen Martin Short and Harry Shearer’s Saturday Night Live skit from 1984? Of course you have.

All the fun-poking and jokes, though, are a convenient cover for the truth about artistic swimming: It might be the most difficult and demanding sport in the entire Olympic Games, and it forces its practitioners to ask themselves the most basic and brutal of questions: How far can I push myself to be great? How far should I let others, even those closest to me, push me? Do I possess the physical and psychological strength to go beyond my breaking point? And what might it cost me in the attempt?

The demands placed on Megumi Field in Paris will be as high or higher than those of any of her teammates. The U.S. has qualified for the Olympics in artistic swimming for the first time since 2008, and Field will compete in both the team and duet events — the former features all eight swimmers on the squad, the latter just two, obviously. But what does that word, compete, mean in practical terms in artistic swimming? Let Megumi herself tell you.

“It’s like running a mile,” she said recently, “then holding your breath for 30-second increments while you’re already exhausted from running. At the same time, think of the most complex math problem as you can, and you’re trying to solve it as you’re dying from lack of air. That kind of equates to what we have to do.”

She started in the sport when she was 5. Her mother, Naomi, who is from Tokyo, had loved the 2001 film Waterboys, an acclaimed Japanese comedy about synchronized swimming. She had put Megumi in the pool before Megumi’s second birthday, but there were no synchro schools in Delaware. Phoenixville was the only club close enough, and Megumi took to the sport so well that she, Whitman, and Naomi went all-in immediately, finding ways to supplement her synchro training: gymnastics on Tuesday nights, speed swimming at another YMCA, ballet at a Russian-run school — each element a necessity if she was to excel.

“You need flexibility and grace,” said Hatt, who had competed in synchro while at Pennsbury High School and Millersville University. “You need to be as powerful as a gymnast, as graceful as a dancer, and you need to do everything upside down underwater.”

“Her Japanese training gave her an appreciation for the intensity of the work required to perform excellently at this extraordinarily difficult sport,” said Whitman, who owns and operates a material innovation company. “It is truly an extraordinarily difficult sport. It just looks like a bunch of girls splashing around in the water. It’s not.”

You need to be as powerful as a gymnast, as graceful as a dancer, and you need to do everything upside down underwater.

“That foundation, working on it three hours a day every single day when you’re super-young, is so boring,” Megumi said. “You don’t want to do it. But it’s because of all that boring stuff that you’re able to do the fun stuff later.”

Fun? To Megumi, fun was timing how long she could hold her breath underwater. Her record? Three minutes. After returning home from Japan, she would resume training at Freedom Valley, and her lung capacity impressed her coaches there. To help swimmers learn to control their breathing, Hatt and her staff would have them perform what they called “under/overs”: Swim one lap entirely underwater. Take one gulp of air. Then freestyle-swim another lap without taking another.

At one practice, when several swimmers struggled to stay submerged, Hatt told them that the exercise was a “mental game” and that, even though she was out of shape, she could still probably do it. Megumi challenged her to a duel. With a lifeguard supervising them, they would swim underwater laps for as long as they could. First one to breathe lost. “There was no way I was letting a 10-year-old beat me,” Hatt said, “so I did two more underwater breaststrokes after she popped up. Thought I was going to die. Megumi said, ‘Let’s do it again’ with a gleam in her eye. Never tried racing her again.” She was 9 years old.

It was all happening so fast now, and still, Megumi and her parents wanted her rise to quicken. Freedom Valley had never produced a Junior Olympian until she came along, and on her first 12-and-under national team, Megumi spent two weeks at a competition in Puerto Rico. The coach of the 13- to 15-year-olds, her team practicing every day in the same pool, was Hiea-Yoon Kang, who had been coaching within the USA Artistic Swimming program since 2011 and who ran one of the best synchro clubs in the country: the Aquabelles in La Mirada, Calif., near Los Angeles. When she watched Kang, Megumi saw the same kind of coach delivering the same kind of withering discipline and insistence on perfection that she’d experienced, and thrived under, in Japan.

“I don’t know what it was about her, but I couldn’t stop staring at her,” said Megumi, who will enroll at Stanford University in the fall. “We have all these pictures from when I was on that team, and when we’re both in a picture, I’m literally staring at her. I don’t know what it was, but I was like, ‘I want to be coached by her.’ I was drawn to her.”

She joined the Aquabelles in 2016, and once a month for a year, the Fields traveled from one coast of the continent to the other. It was too much and, at the same time, not enough. Naomi and Megumi moved to Southern California so Megumi could work with Kang year-round. She was 10 years old.

If you want to go for the Olympics, you’re not going to have a normal childhood.

“If you want to go for the Olympics, you’re not going to have a normal childhood,” Megumi said. “You have to establish the sacrifices you’re willing to make and have to make in order to get there. But friends and family who support you through the tough times are really important. For example, as soon as school ended, there was no time to chitchat or really hang out with friends. You just go straight from school to practice late at night. ‘I want to go to her birthday party or her playdate or her sleepover. But I have practice. I’ve got the Olympics to get to.’”

That was the purpose of relocating to La Mirada, of pursuing this particular coach with her particular coaching style, of all the self-created stresses and situations that might make another athlete or parent ask, Is this really worth it? Then, two months ago, the payoff for all of her and her family’s sacrifices was thrown into jeopardy.

On May 18, the Orange County Register revealed that, based on interviews conducted and documents obtained by investigative reporter Scott Reid, the U.S. Center for SafeSport had “received complaints from as many as 18 swimmers and parents against Kang detailing more than 80 specific allegations over the course of the past 13 years ranging from physical, verbal and emotional abuse, bullying, body shaming, forcing athletes to compete or train while injured or suffering from medical issues that required surgery, and child labor and endangerment abuses.” One national-champion swimmer for the Aquabelles told the Register that Kang “had favorites. I was one of her favorites so I never got the brunt force that other kids did.”

More, Reid wrote, Kang had been suspended as a U.S. national-team coach on May 9, nine days before the Register published its story. Kennedy Shriver, a spokesperson for USA Artistic Swimming, told in a June 20 email to The Inquirer that “Hiea-Yoon Kang is no longer a part of the USAAS coaching staff and will not be attending the Games.” Later, Adam Andrasko, USA Artistic Swimming’s chief executive officer, wrote in an email to The Inquirer that Shriver had misrepresented the organization’s position on Kang. “USA Artistic Swimming indefinitely suspended the national team contract of Hiea-Yoon Kang,” Andrasko wrote, “pending the completion and decision of the U.S. Center for SafeSport’s investigation.” La Mirada officials also suspended Kang from coaching, barred her from the deck of the city pool where the Aquabelles train, and said she will remain suspended until SafeSport’s investigation is finished.

Megumi declined to comment on the accusations against Kang. But Whitman Field said that he was “very distressed” by the allegations and the Register’s story because “it harms the prospects of the team at the Olympics and is damaging to her reputation and to the club. These grievances should not have been aired in the press if the real concern was protection of athletes from abusive behavior.”

In a June 3 email to Oliver Osuna, La Mirada’s community services director, which Field provided to The Inquirer, he wrote: “The public record contains nothing but old reports reinvigorated and mixed with rumor and innuendo by anonymous individuals. … We, like many other ambitious athletic families, moved far away for the privilege of training with Coach Kang, and we have benefited from her rigorous training to the highest degree. Coach Kang is a strict coach who demands precision, but she is not abusive. She is the best coach in the country, and you have acted wrongly by disrupting her training program.”

Osuna replied 13 minutes later. “Please know,” he wrote, in part, “that the steps taken by the City were done so out of an abundance of caution for participants in the program.”

Whitman, in a phone interview, rebutted Osuna: “I don’t think you’ll find a single current Aquabelles parent who was concerned about the safety of the athletes under Coach Kang’s direction.” Well, yes, the parents of the athletes who withstood Kang’s methods would look at it that way, wouldn’t they?

For her part, Megumi said that she has never given any thought to whether there was a line that a coach, either Kang or another, could not cross with her. She has never discussed such a thing with her parents, either.

“It never got to that point,” she said. “I remember when I was younger, still in Delaware, doing all the basics and stuff. Sometimes I’d be complaining: ‘Oh, I don’t want to do this. Oh, I don’t want to get in today.’ Then it was, ‘Oh, do you want to quit?’ Not in a negative way, just like, if this isn’t what you want to do, do you want to stop? I would ask that of myself. And then I was like, ‘Oh, no. I’m just complaining right now. This is my sport. I don’t want to quit.’ ”

Her birthday is Oct. 15. By then, after Paris, after the Olympics, after the moment she has chased her entire young life has passed, someone might ask again the question at the core of her quest: Was it all worth it? Her parents will have one answer. Another Aquabelle might have another. And Megumi Field will have hers. She will be 19 years old.