Free Breaking the Surface by Greg Louganis Page A

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