Education
University of Georgia.
University of Georgia.
He then secured a triple jump and long jump double at the 1985 European Athletics Junior Championships held in Cottbus. That same year he ranked second in the triple jump at the 1985 European Cup. The following year he managed seventh at the 1986 European Athletics Championships.
Another indoor medal followed at the 1989 European Athletics Indoor Championships and he was the silver medallist behind Nikolay Musiyenko of the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics. His final appearance for East Germany came at the 1990 European Athletics Championships and he finished fifth behind his compatriot Jörg Friess.
He made three major international appearances for Germany in his career: he was fifth at the 1991 IAAF World Indoor Championships, 13th in qualifying at the 1993 World Championships in Athletics and eighth in qualifying at the 1994 European Athletics Championships. Mai was implicated in state-sponsored doping by Werner Franke and Brigitte Berendonk in their book Doping: From Research to Deceit.
Based upon research of leaked Stasi files, Franke and Berendonk deduced that Mai had undergone cycles of Oral Turinabol (a banned steroid) in the period of 1982 to 1984. After his track and field career ended he moved to the United States to study microbiology.
He received his doctorate in the discipline at the University of Georgia.
After gaining a master"s degree from Harvard School of Public Health, he took up an assistant professorship at the University of Maryland Medical School. He has worked as an assistant microbiology professor at the University of Florida since 2007.