Breaking the Surface (9 page)

I probably could have gotten enough time on the good diving board if I’d tried, but I thought I needed extra time in order to feel really prepared. So it was just easier to use one of the boards that no one else wanted to use. Unfortunately, when it came to the actual competition, I was stuck using that board, because it was the one I’d gotten used to. That didn’t help my performance.

There was another reason I didn’t want to get in anyone’s way. Some of the other divers were mumbling that I was too young and inexperienced to have made the team on springboard. They said I had just gotten lucky. Given that I’d qualified to compete in the Olympic trials because of that calculating error, I tried to be as invisible as I could.

Then I discovered that Dr. Lee wasn’t allowed to come down to the pool deck to coach me, and that pushed me over the edge. Dr. Lee may have been tough on me, but I really needed him there to coach me. But Dr. Lee wasn’t one of the team coaches, so he wasn’t allowed onto the pool deck. I was left on my own.

Ron O’Brien, whose diving camp I had attended, was the head coach there, but he had his own four divers to coach. There were two other coaches, but they too were coaching their own divers. I got so frustrated that I walked over to the side of the pool deck and started crying. The team manager stepped in to help, but it wasn’t enough. I needed fine-tuning, and no one was helping me.

The preliminary round in springboard didn’t go well. I barely made the cut. Eight divers made it into the final round (after 1980, twelve divers made it to the finals), and I placed sixth. That night, I really needed my sleep, but between being upset about how I’d done in the preliminaries and worrying about how I’d do in the final round, I couldn’t sleep.

The U.S. diving team had a strict curfew. At the world championships, divers had been out partying until three and four in the morning. Ron was determined to prevent that from happening in Montreal, so he set a curfew of 10:30 p.m., but people sneaked out after Ron checked us in and wandered in at all hours.

One of my roommates stumbled in drunk at three in the morning. I was already tossing and turning, and his stumbling around just made things worse. I was trying my best to follow the rules, but no one else seemed to care.

As we were getting ready for the springboard finals, one of my teammates wished me luck and said, “Whatever you do, don’t take the gold away from me.” I’m sure now that he meant it as a compliment, but at the time it upset me. I thought he was acting as if the gold were already his, and that I’d better not steal it from him. I thought we were supposed to be teammates, which to me meant that we were supposed to be encouraging each other to do our best.

One of the toughest lessons for me at the 1976 Olympics was that it was each man for himself, just the opposite of the Olympic ideal. There was a shocking lack of camaraderie on the U.S. team. I shouldn’t have expected any different, because in general there was never any kind of team spirit among the divers. Individual sports are very competitive. Some of the divers didn’t make a big deal of the rivalries, but others did. I usually kept my mouth shut and let my diving speak for me.

The final round of springboard was a big disappointment. I placed sixth and was so embarrassed that I went straight to the lockers without saying a word to my parents, who were waiting for me by the side of the pool. I didn’t want to see them. I went back to the Olympic Village in shame and went to bed. I didn’t want to talk to anyone or see anyone.

The preliminary round for ten-meter platform was even worse. I developed an awful toothache, and it felt like my head was going to explode every time I did a dive. Still, I managed to win the preliminaries, and as soon as I could get out of the pool, I went to the dentist in the Olympic Village, who found a hairline fracture in one of my molars and did some drilling to try to relieve some of the pressure I was feeling. By the next day, the pain was gone, just in time for the final round.

The diver to beat was two-time gold medalist Klaus Dibiasi, the twenty-eight-year-old Blond Angel, as he was sometimes called. He was seventeen when he went to his first Olympics, so in some ways we’d had the same beginning. This was now his fourth Olympics and my first. We had competed once before, at an international competition several months earlier, where I came in a close second to him. I’d already beaten Klaus in the platform preliminaries, so I was feeling confident that I could do it again in the final round.

It must have been exciting for the audience watching the final round, because Klaus and I were matching each other dive for dive, right through the eighth dive. I was more terrified than excited. We had only two more dives to go, and as long as I didn’t blow a dive, I stood a chance of beating Klaus for the gold.

My ninth dive was a front three-and-a-half pike. Not a lot of divers had been doing that one yet, and I still wasn’t that consistent with it. Sure enough, I made the same mistake I’d made before: for some reason, as I was stretching for the water, I kept my head down, so it washed over—I went past vertical. I got between 4s and 6s on the dive, which effectively knocked me out of the competition for the gold.

Even before I came up from under the water, I knew I’d done a bad dive. As I got out of the pool, Dr. Lee was there to let me know just how bad. We were on the side of the pool, and even though there were people around us, Dr. Lee was cursing at me. He called me
dummkopf,
saying, “Goddamnit, you’re so stupid. How could you do that?” All I could do was stare at the ground, with my arms folded across my chest.

I was humiliated. Dr. Lee was saying that I’d let him down. In typical fashion, I wasn’t mad at him; I was mad at myself. All I could think was that he’d put so much work into getting me to the Olympics, he’d made so many sacrifices, and I had failed him. He had cut back on his medical practice to train me, and he had lost money. I didn’t say anything to him. I just yelled at myself in my own head. I beat myself up pretty bad, telling myself how stupid I was and how I was a failure at diving. I let all my self-doubts about being retarded drag me down, and I felt worthless. It makes me sad now when I think of how hard I was on myself. I was only a kid. This was my first Olympics, and I’d won a silver medal. That was a lot to be proud of. Unfortunately, I had so little selfconfidence that I couldn’t see it, and there was no way I could defend myself against Dr. Lee’s outburst. I counted on his approval in the same way I had counted on the approval of my past coaches and my parents. And when I got just the opposite, I thought I had only myself to blame. It never occurred to me then that Dr. Lee was out of line.

When Dr. Lee was done yelling at me, I went off to a little waiting area near the pool to get ready for my final dive. I thought that at some point he would come back to see me, but he didn’t. I interpreted that to mean that he was so angry with me that he didn’t want to see me. I tried to stay focused and said to myself over and over again, “One more dive, and it’s all over.”

Just before I got up to walk over to the platform for my last dive, Dr. Lee came up to me and said that even though the gold was out of reach, I should show them what I was made of. He said, “Go out and nail your last dive.” I heard it, but it didn’t sink in. At that point, I was too hurt to really hear anything Dr. Lee had to say.

The last dive was a front triple-twisting one-and-a-half, one of my more consistent dives. I could always find vertical, no matter what was going on around me or in my own head. So I climbed the ladder to the platform, shut everything out—the audience, my competitors, the judges, Dr. Lee, and my doubts—and executed the dive. Beyond knowing that it was an adequate dive, I had no idea how it went.

After I finished my dive, I went to get dressed for the awards ceremony. Then I walked with the other two winners to the waiting area where we stood before they announced us. Klaus came over to me and put his arm around me and said, “Next time, Moscow 1980, I see you win two gold medals.” That felt wonderful. It was like the passing of the torch from one of the greatest divers in the world. It meant a lot to me, especially because Klaus had won a silver medal in Tokyo when he was seventeen, and now he’d won his third Olympic gold medal. Given all the competitiveness and lack of good sportsmanship I saw at the Olympics, it was surprising and wonderful to see such a gracious winner.

As soon as the ceremony ended, my mom came down from the stands to meet me on the deck. We hugged, and both of us cried. She was crying because she was thrilled; I’d won the silver. I was still crying because I’d let everyone down. I thought everyone, from Dr. Lee to the people in the stands, expected me to win the gold medal. So I was still feeling ashamed for having lost. I didn’t think of myself as a winner, although with the exception of Dr. Lee, everyone else did, including my father. He was there with Mom, and he put his arm around me and whispered in my ear, “I’m very proud of you.” It didn’t make sense to me, and I thought he was just trying to be nice.

Before we left the pool hall, an American official came up to me and thanked me for my ninth dive, which confused me even more. He said, “I thought we’d have to protest the scores.” He and the other American officials felt the judges had been scoring me low and Klaus high since the start of the platform finals. So even if I’d nailed my ninth dive, he believed I wouldn’t have scored high enough overall to win the gold.

The scoring of dives is subjective, and judges are not immune to human emotion. I was the young newcomer with no Olympic record. Klaus had an established record. He was a favorite, who had proven himself over and over again. It made sense that he got the benefit of the doubt. It would be the same situation in 1988, when I was the old-timer being challenged by a young upstart and I would get the benefit of the doubt.

I had no way of knowing if the judges were scoring me low at the Olympics. I had nothing to compare it to, and since I missed my ninth dive, it didn’t make a difference. But even if they’d scored me low, it wouldn’t have surprised me.

There was something else that happened, however, that had surprised me. A judge had approached me before the platform competition and said, “I understand you want to win the gold medal. We need to get together and talk.” This was in the pool area, and I’d been standing off by myself. The judge, who was not American, suggested that I come to his room to talk about it.

I was naive—I was sixteen—but I wasn’t stupid. It was as clear as day to me that he was propositioning me. Here was a man who was older than my father, a man who was supposed to be judging my dives, and he wanted to get me to his room. The whole thing was surreal. I was shocked. I knew the judging was often political, but did divers actually sleep with a judge to get a higher score? And since they throw out the high and low scores, how much of a difference could one judge make anyway?

I was offended by the whole thing, but I managed to say no as graciously as I could. I have no idea if that affected my scores, because I never thought to go back and check the record to see if he scored me low. That was the one and only time a judge ever propositioned me, but I doubt I’m the only Olympic athlete who has ever had that experience.

Following the awards ceremony, there was a team dinner. All the divers were seated at a head table. I was so stunned from the competition that the evening was a blur. I remember Dr. Lee getting up and talking about how I was like a son to him, how he was so proud of me, how I’d come so far. I know now that he was genuinely proud of me, although at the time I was deeply confused. I was still hurt from the dressing down he’d given me for failing to win the gold. It was his way of apologizing, but I still felt guilty that I had let him down. His praising me in public only made me feel worse.

I
was
like a son to Dr. Lee. And he was like my father. Both were stoic, stern, often unbending and uncompromising. I always wished Dr. Lee had been more like John Anders, more like the fantasy father I wished I’d had.

It would be many years and another two trips to the Olympics before I could hold that silver medal in my hand and feel anything other than revulsion. And it would be many more years before I would understand that I should have been angry at Dr. Lee for making me feel that winning the silver was a defeat.