Breaking the Surface (28 page)

I
’
VE OFTEN SAID THAT
diving was my refuge. If ever I needed a refuge from what was going on in my life, it was during the 1988 Olympics. In the past, it had always been a struggle to keep the turmoil of my daily life and the ups and downs of my own emotions from getting in the way of what I did on the diving board. In Seoul, it was almost impossible.

This time, there was just too much going on to push it all aside. Starting with that first night in Seoul, there was no way I could clear my head and fall asleep. I’d toss and turn for hours, and once I finally drifted off to sleep, my alarm would go off for my next dose of AZT.

Ron was under a lot of pressure beyond diving. Mary Jane still calls the weeks leading up to the Olympics the “five weeks from hell.” On August first Bruce Kimball, my friend and rival on the ten-meter platform, had a terrible car accident in which the car he was driving killed two people. He’d apparently been drinking. All of us were upset by the accident and the controversy that followed. A lot of people didn’t think Bruce should be allowed to compete in the Olympics because of what happened, but he wound up not making it through the Olympic trials anyway. The whole thing hit Ron’s family especially hard because Bruce and Ron’s son were good friends.

Then two weeks later, Ron and Mary Jane’s son-in-law killed himself. Right after that they had to put their dog, Amity, to sleep. Amity had been Ron’s constant companion for fourteen years. I don’t mean to put a suicide and the death of a dog in the same league, but losing an animal’s love is still a blow. Then Ron’s mom became seriously ill and went into the hospital. Ron wanted to be with her, and I was honored and grateful that he chose to stay with me in Seoul. I could never have made it through the Olympics without him.

Just hours before the springboard preliminaries got under way, Ron got the call that his mother had died. He didn’t think it would do any of us any good to know about it, so he didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to burden me. I’ve never in my life had someone show as much concern for me.

I had no idea what Ron was going through, and I was feeling pretty good the day of the preliminaries. Through each round my confidence grew. By the end of my eighth dive, I had a comfortable lead, and my next dive was the reverse two-and-a-half pike, which was usually one of my best. As I was getting ready to climb the ladder, Ron was debating whether to warn me that earlier I’d been a little too close to the board on another of my reverse dives. But he decided not to say anything, because I was never close doing a reverse two-and-a-half pike. My distance on that dive had always been just right, so Ron decided that he didn’t want to give me another thing to think about.

In one of the articles published during the Olympics about my diving, the reporter estimated that I’d done 180,000 springboard dives in my eighteen-year career. During that time, I’d had some close calls, like hitting my hands and hitting my feet on the board, but I’d never hit my head, at least not on springboard. I guess the lesson there is that you always have to watch out for dive number 180,001.

News of my accident on the diving board was reported around the world. I can only imagine the number of times the videotape of me hitting my head was played over and over again on the news. Every major newspaper published a picture of my head making contact with the diving board. It was a shocking moment, not only for me. I was the top diver in the world, and almost no one imagined I’d hit my head on the diving board at the Olympics.

I’d been upset that my parents weren’t in Seoul to see me compete, but now I was glad that my mom, in particular, wasn’t there to see me hit my head. It would have been terribly upsetting for her. Given the time difference between the U.S. and Korea and the tape-delayed TV coverage, she saw the videotape only after she had been told what happened, so she knew that I was okay. It turned out that she wasn’t surprised. After I had left for Korea, she told some of her friends that she had a feeling I was going to hurt myself at the Olympics. She told them that I was under too much stress, not knowing, of course, that I was also dealing with HIV. They told her that she was being silly, that nothing was going to happen.

Because I was back on the board so quickly and apparently in good humor, people didn’t realize how badly shaken I was. In fact, it wasn’t until after I’d completed the preliminary round and made the finals that I allowed myself to really think about what had happened. If I hadn’t blocked it out, I would never have made it through the last two dives.

That night, between my sore head, trying to sort out what I’d done wrong, and worrying about whether or not I’d put anyone in danger, I couldn’t fall asleep. I eventually drifted off, only to be awakened by the AZT alarm clock. After that, I gave up and just stayed in bed until six o’clock, when I got up to get ready for practice, having had less than three hours of sleep.

Normally, finals are in the evening, so you have twenty-four hours between prelims and the final round. But because of the live television broadcast schedule for the finals, they were being held at eleven in the morning, and I had to be at practice at eight. I didn’t really like having finals in the morning, but I was glad they weren’t in the evening this time. With so much going on in my head, I couldn’t have held it together until the end of the day.

At eight o’clock, I met Ron at the bus to go over to the pool to work out. I barely said hello, and when we got on the bus, I took a seat by myself. I just wanted to be alone and listen to music on my headphones. Ron sat in a seat nearby. He could tell just by looking at me that my confidence was badly shaken.

He realized that his plan to take it easy on me that morning would only make the situation worse, so he decided to be tough on me, to help me regain my confidence. Before a major competition, Ron usually had me do two of each of my dives and that was it. The whole idea was to get the feel of the board and get warmed up, to do just enough to feel relaxed. That had been our routine for the past eight years.

Before we even started the workout, Ron warned me, “Don’t have high expectations. Just get through the workout. Get through your dives. That’s your goal this morning.” Ron knew that I had to get through my dives safely to start building up my confidence. I had to be sure of myself in that final round. When you’re competing on a world-class level, there’s not much room for error. I had to be on.

If you saw the start of my workout that morning, you would have thought that there was no way this guy could do it. The first thing Ron made me do was the dive I’d missed the day before, the reverse two-and-a-half, to prove to me that I could do the dive, that what happened the day before had been a fluke. I did the dive, and when I came to the surface, Ron said very sternly, “C’mon, don’t be a wimp! You were too far out there. Do another!” He was right, I was way out in the middle of the pool, but I was terrified of being too close to the board. So I did another, and he said, “C’mon, stand up a little bit. Do another!”

Ron was being a real taskmaster, really kicking butt. Usually, he’s very positive and sort of gentle. This time his whole attitude was different; even his voice was different. He was very aggressive, almost like Dr. Lee had been. At that point, I needed him to tell me what to do, to help push me over the hurdle of my own fear.

Whatever Ron told me to do, I did. I trusted him and I surrendered myself to him. I had to, because I didn’t trust myself anymore. I didn’t have my own confidence, so I was drawing on Ron’s confidence and strength. It’s ironic that this kind of selfless faith in someone else was key to my success as a diver while it was devastating in my personal life.

Whatever it was, it worked. After the first four dives I felt stronger, and my last two were pretty good. My legs were starting to feel solid under me again. Ron would have made me do a dozen of those dives if he had to, but after a half dozen, satisfied that I’d gotten past it, that I’d be able to do it in the finals, we moved on to my other dives, and I did two or three of each of them. The rest of the practice was pretty routine, and by the time we finished, Ron and I even managed to joke a little with each other.

To get through the final round of the springboard competition, I had to stay focused on the diving or I’d never do well enough to win the gold. Practice had helped a lot, but it was still a struggle to put everything else in the background. Fortunately, putting everything else in the background was what I’d been trained to do. I’d been through adversity before. I’d had rough conditions before. I’d hurt myself before. I’d learned to dive even when I didn’t want to, when I didn’t feel well, when the weather was bad, when I was injured, when I was depressed. Still, this time was harder. I’d never faced a challenge quite like this before, and I was scared that I just couldn’t do it this time. The worst part was, I still hadn’t figured out what I’d done wrong the day before. I was having a block; I just couldn’t process it. So I had to put that out of my head, too. I had to trust my body to do the right thing, even though my mind couldn’t understand what had happened.

An odd advantage to my having hit my head was that all of a sudden I became the underdog. It’s a position I’m comfortable with, so it alleviated some of the pressure of being first in prelims. There wasn’t that automatic assumption that I was going to win.

It was the first time in a long time that I had to come from behind. Several years before, at the nationals, my legs had given out on a dive, and I landed with my hands and feet together. I got all zeroes and dropped to twelfth place in the preliminary round. They took the top twelve, so I went on to the finals, and in the end won. But this was the Olympics, and hitting my head was worse than having my legs buckle.

I was still feeling shaky by the time the competition got under way. I tried to concentrate on taking the dives one at a time. That’s the way I normally did it. Ron was there the whole time for me to lean on. I let him know that I needed a little extra support by giving him my chamois before each dive. Although we never discussed it, Ron knew if I gave him my chamois that I needed a little more attention, an extra push. It was my way of signaling that I had some doubts.

I felt timid in the first few rounds, not diving as aggressively as I normally did. I still did my dives well, and with each one I felt stronger and more confident. Through five rounds, I built up a nine-point lead on Tan Liangde, a Chinese diver who’d beaten me twice earlier that year at international meets. In the seventh round, when Tan had trouble with the reverse two-and-a-half, which, of course, had been my ninth dive, I opened up a twentypoint lead.

In finals you do the same exact dives you did in prelims. The momentum was building with each dive, and I grew more and more confident, through the eighth dive. But the thought of doing the ninth dive scared me. I was afraid of hitting my head again, of embarrassing myself, of not winning the gold—or any medal. Ron said only one thing to me before I headed up the ladder: “Just do it like you always do it.”

Standing on the board, I could feel the tension. I knew everyone in the stands was waiting for me to do the ninth dive, to see how I would handle it. Some people wonder how I could concentrate with all those people watching. When I was in shape, I knew that my timing would be automatic, so I could afford to experience what the crowd was feeling—the excitement, the tension, the support, the enthusiasm—and I’d used that energy in my dive. That’s what I did at the ’84 Olympics. When I could experience the audience, that gave me a more emotional and fulfilling performance. It was a lot more fun to dive in those circumstances. It’s like being onstage performing in a play, because you’re getting the audience involved.

Now I couldn’t afford to experience the audience at all and just screened them out. I took a couple of deep breaths and an extra moment to concentrate. I jumped it out a little bit, but not too much, because I couldn’t afford to lose any points. When I came to the surface, I was laughing, just from the sense of relief. The scores were good, ranging from 8 to 9.

My next dive was fine. And for the final dive, I did a reverse three-and-a-half tuck. I didn’t rip it, but it was certainly good enough for me to win. My total score was 730.80. Now I just had to wait to see how the final two divers did. Because I’d finished third in the preliminaries, I was the third-to-last diver. At the time, we dove in reverse order of finish. It was nice for a change not to be the final diver. Usually, there’s a lot of pressure on you if you’re the final diver, especially if it’s close.

With my job done, the pressure was off me. I went over to Ron at the side of the pool and he gave me a hug. He told me that I’d done a great job, that I was tough, and added, “It’s a good thing you have a hard head.” We didn’t talk about winning. We never talked about it before the fact.

I went back to the waiting area, where the divers hung out between dives, to gather my things and see what was going to happen. I was just thankful that I’d gotten through the finals in a respectable way. I still hoped I’d win the gold, but the ball was in Tan’s court. I had no control over what he did. I tried not to watch, but I couldn’t help but peek.