By Ron Flatter
Special to ESPN.com
To pick one athlete as the greatest ever in his or her sport is a good way to start an argument. But maybe not in every sport. Try thinking of anyone who was a better diver than Greg Louganis.
 | |
| As a troubled youth, Greg Louganis used diving as an escape. He found peace at the top of the ladder. |
But McCormick and Dibiasi were not as dominant as Louganis. Not just in their time. For all-time. The first to amass 700 points in a diving competition under the current scoring system, Louganis is still the only one who has accomplished that in the Olympics. By the time anyone has a chance of matching that feat, 16 years will have passed since he first did it in 1984.
Only the 1980 American boycott of the Moscow Games prevented Louganis from piling more gold onto his Olympic resumé. Even when he hit his head on the springboard executing a dive in 1988, Louganis still won an Olympic championship.
That dive also caused him some concern for another reason. At the time, Louganis secretly knew he was HIV-positive. If he had bled into the pool -- which he did not -- could Louganis have spread the AIDS virus to another competitor? Although doctors agreed the odds of that happening were minute, Louganis later said, "It must seem irresponsible now, but I hadn't considered the possibility that I could injure myself in that way."
By 1994, Louganis had publicly acknowledged his homosexuality, and in 1995, his autobiography "Breaking the Surface" became a best-seller shortly after he told Barbara Walters on national television he was suffering from full-blown AIDS.
The life story of Gregory Efthimios Louganis began in San Diego on Jan. 29, 1960, when he was born to parents of Samoan and Swedish ancestry. Both were only 15, and they gave up their nine-month-old child for adoption to Peter and Frances Louganis, who had already adopted an older daughter.
As a youngster, Louganis was ridiculed by schoolmates for his ethnicity, his dyslexia and his choices of extracurricular activities -- acrobatics, dance and gymnastics. But the tumbling skills he learned came in handy around the family pool, where Louganis found himself rolling off the end of the diving board. This led his father to enroll him in diving classes.
Only two years after his first lesson, the 11-year-old Louganis turned heads when he scored a perfect 10 at the 1971 Junior Olympics national competition in Colorado Springs, Colo.
But Louganis was not yet fully dedicated to diving. By the time he was 12, he was doing speed, selling marijuana at school and even attempting suicide. Eventually, he turned more and more to diving, the one area of his life that gave him self-confidence and success. Before long, daily diving practices became Louganis' outlet, affording him a solitude he desired during his adolescence.
Louganis moved away from his parents in 1975 and into the home of his coach, Dr. Sammy Lee, an Olympic diving gold medalist in 1948 and 1952 who had seen young Greg's perfect dive in Colorado Springs. Lee, an Olympic medal in his mind, coached Louganis on a strict schedule of training sessions.
 |
|
| Previous poll results |
Not that any clues were coming from Louganis himself. Returning home with the platform silver and a sixth-place finish in the springboard, he felt he had failed in Montreal. He became more and more introspective, and he turned to alcohol and cigarettes.
Hoping to get as far away from the world in which he grew up as he could, Louganis decided to go from one coast to the other when he accepted a diving scholarship from the University of Miami. Shortly before going off to college, Louganis won his first world platform title in 1978. He would win four more world championships besides 47 AAU national titles.
After winning the springboard and platform at the 1979 Pan-American Games, Louganis was expected to win Olympic gold in Moscow. That was before President Jimmy Carter called for a U.S. boycott in protest of the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan.
Maybe Louganis was just not meant to be in the Soviet Union. The year before the 1980 Olympics, he hit his head on the platform diving at a meet in Tbilisi, a harbinger of things to come nine years later.
The boycott only postponed the inevitable for Louganis, who, in 1981, had transferred to UC Irvine in his native Southern California. He made the move to get closer to coach Ron O'Brien, who headed up the prestigious Mission Viejo Swim Club.
At the 1982 World Championships, Louganis became the first diver in a major international meet to get a perfect score of 10 from all seven judges. He embarked on a national winning streak that would not end until 1987. Along the way, he earned his bachelor of arts degree in theater, and he quit smoking and drinking. Louganis was ready to conquer life -- and the Olympics.
In winning both the springboard and the platform at the 1984 Los Angeles Games, Louganis became the first man to pull off that Olympic double since American Pete Desjardins in 1928. He also was the first to pass 700 points in both events in the same Olympics. His 710.91 points remain the most recorded in the Olympic platform competition since the advent of the current scoring system, and his victory in the springboard was the most lopsided in the history of the Games. That dominance also earned for Louganis the Sullivan Award, which annually goes to America's best amateur athlete.
His encore performance four years later in Seoul did not come as easily. Leading going into the ninth round of the preliminaries of the springboard, he attempted a reverse 2½ somersault pike. Without a strong enough jump, he hit his head on the board and fell clumsily into the water.
After taking temporary sutures to sew up a scalp wound, he came back 35 minutes later to resume diving. After finishing qualifying, he went to a hospital, where the sutures were replaced by five mattress stitches. The next day, he hit all 11 dives and won easily.
A week later, in the finals of the platform competition, Louganis trailed 14-year-old Xiong Ni of China by three points going into the last round. With a reverse 3½ somersault facing him, Louganis nailed that most difficult dive in his program and won the gold medal by 1.14 points. He became only the second athlete to win double diving golds in two Olympics (McCormick did it in 1952 and 1956).
After announcing his retirement from competition in 1989, Louganis became a stage actor. Two of his most noteworthy roles were as a chorus boy who dies of AIDS in the 1993 off-Broadway production of "Jeffrey," and in 1995 in "The Only Thing Worse You Could Have Told Me ...", a one-man comedy about the family life of a gay man.
In 1994, Louganis came out and declared his homosexuality during a videotaped message to athletes competing at Gay Games IV in New York.
Still living in Southern California, Louganis spends much of his time speaking to youth groups about drug and alcohol rehabilitation and working on behalf of organizations helping the dyslexic.
About his athletic achievements, Louganis said, "I don't want to be remembered as the greatest diver who ever lived. I want to be able to see the greatest diver. I hope I live to see the day when my records are broken."