Gymnastics
Mermaid by profession: Nadine Brandl, 31, was Austria's best synchronised swimmer. After the end of her career, she started again in Las Vegas, the largest entertainment metropolis in the world.
There are moments when everything suddenly makes sense, when the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of life fit together in an almost magical way. You feel calm, at one with yourself and, most importantly of all, you feel happy.Nadine Brandl had just such a moment deep in the Wynn Casino Resort, one of the most famous luxury hotels on the Las Vegas Strip. And that moment began with her sticking her hands out of a gigantic swimming pool containing about 3.5 million litres of water.
The Las Vegas dream
It is the year 2020 and Brandl is working at the Wynn Hotel, as she has on so many evenings before. The synchronised swimmer and two-time Olympic competitor from Vienna is a permanent member of the ensemble for Le Rêve (French for “the dream”), the luxury location’s in-house underwater acrobatics show. The setting is suitably surreal and mystic. The pool in the plush theatre is almost like a lake, being as much as 9m deep in places. When the artificial waterfall in the middle of the stage comes cascading down, the faces of 1,600 spectators are splashed with droplets of water. For 75 minutes, they are taken on a journey through a colourful world of wonder by 90 dancers, acrobats, swimmers and artistes. All of it is set to music.
Brandl, who plays a mermaid in the show, adorns the official Le Rêveposter and the city’s buses are plastered with her image. Day and night they dash around Sin City showing the Vienna native gliding dreamily through water. But on this particular evening Brandl is more than just a synchronised swimmer or mermaid in a show; she is the sum of all her talents.
As she reaches the surface of the artificial lake, an acrobat, hanging upside down from a tightrope, comes hurtling towards her from a height of 20m. They clasp hands. Brandl is pulled out of the water and f lies into the air with him. Then she pulls herself up at a dizzying height, as if her body weighed nothing.
They kiss and Brandl the mermaid glides back down into the water in free fall. “It’s my favourite scene,” she says, her eyes sparkling and her voice bursting with pride. “I would never have been selected for this move if I had only done synchronised swimming. My experience in competitive gymnastics and aerial silks definitely helped.” She started learning these aerial arts in the final year of her active sports career. “There was conflict within the team at the time and I was looking for a mental challenge, something that I could work on alone, out of the water,” she says. “You never know when something will come in useful — or even full circle.” Everything had come together. Everything was working out the way that it should.
An underwater family
One thing that soon becomes clear when we get to Nadine Brandl’s house in south-east Las Vegas for this interview is that it would be impossible to dismiss the young woman in front of us — who has her hair down and isn’t wearing any make-up — as just being a talented mover. Yet it’s true that movement has always played a part in the life of the sportswoman, who stands at 1.7m tall. She started competitive gymnastics at the age of six and switched to synchronised swimming when she was 11.
Brandl’s aunt, Alexandra Worisch, is a former European champion in the sport, and her grandmother, Eva Worisch, was an Olympic-standard diver. So it seems that the aquatic sports thing was just meant to be. “I don’t think that I was ever really asked if I wanted to do it,” Brandl recounts with a laugh. “The summer that we came back to Vienna — my father worked as an assistant director and we lived in Belgium and Germany for a couple of years — my gran unceremoniously took me along to synchronised-swimming training. It hadn’t yet been decided which school I would be going to in Austria but it was always taken for granted that I’d be doing sport.”
In other words: “The kids have got to move.” As gymnastics and synchronised swimming are similar in principle — both are technical, compositional sports — decisions were made quickly, even though, as Brandl confesses, “to start with I went down like a cannonball”.And as she goes on to explain, “Synchronised swimming is totally underappreciated. Lots of people think, ‘Oh, you’re the ones who put on make-up and smile.’ Very few people are aware of the strength, co-ordination and body tension that you need for it. There’s nowhere to stop in the water and nothing to push off against. That’s when muscles and fibres that you didn’t even know you had come into play. The huge range of motion in all directions is a completely different dimension, mentally too. You have to get used to that first.”
A woman with a plan
But Brandl picked it up quickly, which brings us to what is perhaps even more remarkable about her than the mastery of her body: she lives to learn new things. She has an almost insatiable desire to acquire skills that she doesn’t yet have. Things get interesting for her at the point when others give up in exasperation, whether dealing with a maths problem, a guitar chord or a whole new area of study. Brandl chose to skip a grade when she was 13 years old so that she could move to a boarding school and play sport all the sooner. “I wanted to do that because at boarding school you can train in the morning too, not just in the afternoon,” she says, taking care to state “can” rather than “must”, which speaks volumes about her attitude to life. She later added a BA in Media Studies, an MBA and an online marketing diploma. “There are always opportunities in the unknown,” she says. And Brandl promised herself at a young age that she would seize as many opportunities as she could because that is the best way to guarantee a fulfilling life.
Brandl took that attitude with her when she moved to the USA in 2016 with two suitcases and a work contract for a show that she didn’t really know anything about. “I’d seen a couple of YouTube videos but I didn’t know much about Le Rêve,” she says. Las Vegas was virgin territory too. “I thought the city beyond the Strip was just desert, cacti and tumbleweed f lying through the air.” Brandl now has a green card and a three-bedroomed house that’s a 14-minute drive from the city’s famous neon welcome sign.
And although Le Rêve is currently on hold — the pandemic has taken its toll on the city of bling too — and Brandl doesn’t know if she is more likely to be a resident of Europe or the US, she has no fear of the future. “My four years in the show were exciting and taught me a lot,” she says. “You’re working with the most talented people in the world: former world champions and Olympic athletes from 15 different countries. Even if it all ended earlier than planned, it has shown me new paths I can go down.”
Choreography, for example, is one option open to her and she recently devised a small opening show of her own. Brandl also works as an underwater model in commercials and short films — she has just finished one shoot in Los Angeles. And then there is acting. But she doesn’t want to speak about the class she is now taking. Or at least, not yet. That still has to grow. In a lot of ways.
No fear of falling
In fact, Brandl prefers to talk about the yoga-instructor qualification that she has just earned, even though yoga wasn’t even on her radar for a long time. “In elite sport you’re happy when you can lie down after training for eight or nine hours and don’t have to do more exercises on a mat,” she says. But a colleague from the ensemble introduced her to yoga and Brandl soon understood that just as synchronised swimming had massively increased her range of motion, so yoga helped her to better know her own body. She now passes on this knowledge through online lessons on her YouTube channel.
And there’s that moment once again. The moment when everything makes sense.Nadine Brandl is living proof that you should always listen to your gut instinct, even if others might say, “That’s nice and all, but don’t you want to do something ‘proper’?” She has always known that she would never end up sitting behind a desk. Movement is as essential to her as food. Sport, she believes, helps her to be the best version of herself. “I just love this lifestyle,” she says. “Of course the training is often hard but that feeling when you’re fit, when you feel strong, when you know what your body is capable of — it’s indescribable. You can’t offset that with money.”
Speaking of which, money has rarely been a deciding factor for her. It comes, it goes. And it will always be there for people who are passionate about something, of that she is convinced. “I look at it this way: we can buy ourselves thousands of material things but they end up gathering dust in the corner or breaking eventually. But our body remains. It doesn’t matter where I’ve lived — Vienna, Berlin, Belgium, Las Vegas — the only thing I’ve always taken with me is my body, so I have to look after it. That’s my job.”
Brandl says it is chief ly down to her parents that she has been able to follow her path so consistently. “At home, no one ever said, ‘You can’t do that.’ This was hugely important. My father likes to tell a story on the subject from when my sister was still very small. She went down the stairs on her own without a problem until someone said, ‘Mind you don’t fall.’ From that point on she was unsure of herself. And that really bothered him. The credo in my family is that you have to leave children be. They will learn.”
Brandl would also apply this policy to adults. “Nobody should put limitations on themselves out of a fear of disgracing themselves. It grates on me when I hear, ‘I can’t, so I won’t even try.’ That means not even giving it a go. How else can you learn to do something that you’ve never done before?”
Muscle memory
As effortlessly as Brandl seems to glide through both life and the water, she does occasionally come unstuck. Sometimes she has to struggle to overcome even the tiniest of things.
It takes me ages to jump into the pool whenever I go swimming,” she says. “I know that must sound paradoxical but I reckon it comes from me having to dive into freezing-cold water at an ungodly hour for years to train. My body has retained the memory that leaping in rips away all the comfort and body heat that you had stored up. That’s why I often hang around the edge for ages.” Then she adds, with a laugh, “But once I’m in the water, I move like an otter.”
Self-confidence and meaning
Before we say goodbye, I ask the question that almost no interviewee likes to answer because it sounds so fraught with meaning and requires smart, beautifully worded replies that wouldn’t seem out of place as epigraphs: “What message do you want to give people to take away?” Nadine thinks. Ten seconds. Fifteen seconds. Twenty. Then she nods with satisfaction and says confidently, “Only what you think matters in the end. What we think of ourselves is important”. Meaning? “If something makes you happy and it is fulfilling, then you’ve got to go for it, regardless of what other people say. People come and go. What inf luence will someone who I listen to now have in 20 years’ time? We all have just one life and we have to shape that life as we see fit.”
And there’s that moment once again. The moment when everything makes sense.
You can see Nadine Brandl coaching on her YouTube channel, Yoga & Fit with Nadine; Instagram: @nadinebrandl
