Victory!!

Chapter 1: The End and the Beginning

If nature has given you long, beautiful legs, then you can consider that you have won the lottery, and you are guaranteed to successfully conquer the heights of artistic swimming. Of course, if you are not deprived of brains and will be able to realize the potential of your legs at least fifty percent. And if you can't... After all, why waste the golden years of youth in suffering from the eternal cold of water, daily six-hour workouts and the screams of your favorite coach?

"Vile creature! Keep sharp your damn legs before I do it myself!"

"When will you start listening to music, trash? Or should I clear your ears?"

According to the sixteenth commandment of all athletes, hearing a shout from a coach is a blessing. But the members of 'The Santa Clara Aquamaiden' sports club did not understand half of my mother's swearing, which was hotly uttered in Russian they did not understand. All of them were hanging on the surface of the water, stupidly blinking their eyes. Only by one intonation did they realize that they had screwed up, and now they were struggling to figure out what they needed to fix.

Mom still managed to translate her words to the Americans, and now they listened to the angry tirade anew, but in their native language.

As it is not difficult to guess, my mother is an outstanding artistic swimming coach, and the fact that I am a artistic swimmer is also not at all surprising. We, or rather my mother, were invited for the season by the previously mentioned "Aquamaiden" club to raise the level of local artistic swimmers, who, by the way, looked very unhappy for the first few weeks after meeting my mother. It is understandable — Americans are not in favor of our sport, they are not used to spending a lot of time and effort training.

Later, one season smoothly flowed into the second, then into the third, and here we are for so long that at the time we would have settled in California for good. The reason for everything, of course, was the rather large sums of contracts that were offered to my mother.

Personally, I didn't like 'Aquamaiden'. Neither the pool, nor the girls, nor their coaches.

"Arai! Are you going to sit here for a long time?"

Chris Killer, the head coach of 'Aquamaiden', was not in the mood today. Just the sight of her in that otherwise bright pink down jacket with her neat blonde haircut almost made me grimace.

In general, the old lady is rarely in the mood. Especially when she talks to me. With our arrival, her power in the club was becoming less and less, who would like that? So, for lack of an opportunity to find out the relationship with my mother, she often took it out on me.

"I was allowed to warm up."

We must have looked very comical from the outside. Me, surrounded by clouds of steam in a huge diving tub, and Chris towering over me, who had a clear desire to get to someone.

"Ten minutes is enough. Step into the water"

In search of salvation, I cast a hopeful glance at my mother, but, as luck would have it, she was busy with wayward artistic swimmers who could not pass the first piece of the team routine or less cleanly all morning.

"Into the water. Quickly," she repeated to me in a tone that brooked no objections.

Not hiding my displeasure, I picked up my legs, getting up. My right knee ached in protest. The air was cold, and I almost screamed and jumped out of the tub, rushing to the pool like a bullet. The water greeted me with a slight warmth of the temperature difference. Alright. I'll be stiff again in five minutes.

One of the strongest clubs in the USA trained in an outdoor pool. In summer, it's nothing, you can survive a tan under a swimsuit, but in winter....

The sports complex, in fact, was huge. Just a paradise for water sports. Next to our not so big, but deep, there was a long fifty-meter swimming pool for swimmers, equipped with a dozen bedside tables on both sides. To the right of it there is a water polo pool not separated by paths. We shared our own pool with divers, for whom multi-tiered towers and trampolines were built here. But this morning only we trained, and even the swimmers who had been in the water since five o'clock. And how can you come in so early? Real monsters.