Breaking the Surface (29 page)

As soon as Tan did his dive—which was a little back and a little short—I knew I’d won. It was a big relief, much like I’d experienced in 1984, when I won my first gold. Ron came looking for me to tell me that I’d won. By the time he found me, I’d already gotten the news and was changing to get ready for the awards ceremony. Ron was thrilled, and thought we’d done a pretty good job of showing everyone how tough I was. But I didn’t feel very tough. As Ron hugged me, my legs felt wobbly and I was on the verge of passing out.

The awards ceremony was a complete blur. I can’t remember if I was crying, and when I asked Ron if he remembered if I was crying, he said that he couldn’t see, because
he
was crying. You can’t go through something like that and not be emotional.

Before they gave us the awards, I congratulated Tan. He nodded and turned away. I couldn’t blame him for being upset. I had kept him from winning the gold at the Olympics for the second time—he had also come in second in ’84. After I hit my head, I imagine the Chinese thought that this was finally their chance.

When the official put that award around my neck, I thought of Ron. We won the gold medal together, because I could never have done it without him. He still jokes that
he
couldn’t have done it without me.

After the awards ceremony, there was a press conference, at which I was asked all the predictable questions: How was I able to get up and do that dive again? What was going through my mind when I did the ninth dive in the finals? Was I afraid that I’d hit my head again? One of my answers was, “It would have been really embarrassing if I hit my head on the board twice.” Not to mention painful.

Following the press conference, I had doping. They take a urine sample right after your event to make sure you weren’t taking any drugs to enhance your performance. Despite John’s reassurance that the AZT and the Bactrim wouldn’t show up, I was still nervous. Before I went back to the Village, Ron and I talked briefly about what came next.

There really wasn’t the chance to enjoy our win, because we both knew that the next day we had to start again. Ron suggested that I take a day or two off and let my head rest. He knew I could take a couple of days off and still have enough time to get ready for the platform competition. But I told Ron that I wanted to do my dives the next day as planned. We’d had a schedule going into the Olympics, and planned to train for three days prior to the platform event. I didn’t want to change it. The fact that I had stitches in my head and a bruised skull made me even more determined not to change anything. I was still battling to keep myself together. I had to build up my confidence, and taking any time off would have been giving in. Sticking to our original schedule would help me prove to myself that I could do it no matter what. After the Games were over, I could take off as much time as I wanted—but not yet. I still had a job to do.

Ron and I said good night. He and Mary Jane went to dinner, and I went back to the Village. I was completely exhausted, but I had to have something to eat and have the stitches in my head checked and the dressing changed. Then I went back to my room and I went to sleep. I don’t think I even looked at my medal. I just got undressed, got into bed, and pulled the blankets over my head. And for a change, I fell into a deep, deep sleep.

At practice the next day, Ron suggested that we start with some of the less difficult work, like practicing lineup and takeoff routines, and save the platform for the second day. You get sore from diving off the platform and you can’t do it day after day, but I wanted to do all my dives that day. It had been five days since I’d done any training on platform, which meant that I hadn’t done any training on platform since I’d hit my head. I wanted to get through all my dives right away just to be sure I could still do them, to remind my body what it had to do.

I also wanted to be sure I’d be able to endure the pain. My head still hurt quite a bit, and I thought it would hurt like hell when I hit the water. It did, especially when I missed my hands. When you do it right, you clasp your hands together just before you hit the water, and your hands break the surface, rather than your head. If your hands are apart, your head absorbs a lot of the impact. From the few times I missed, my ears were ringing from the pain.

Ron went back to his normal style of coaching, and actually gave me more room than he usually did. He left it up to me to decide how hard I wanted to push myself.

During those three days before the platform preliminaries began, Ron and I never talked about what was going to happen or not happen. In a sense, we were in denial and just focused on the job at hand in the way we always did. When you’re under stress like that, you have to stay with your normal routine or the stress takes over and you start getting uptight. Whenever that happened, one of us would make a joke.

I’ve tried to remember if I even saw Tom during this time. I must have, because he was there. But oddly enough, I don’t remember. I only remember seeing Ron. He was the most important person to me, the only one I knew I could count on.

By the time the platform preliminaries began, I was feeling pretty good about my diving, but I was awfully sore. I still had stitches in my scalp, and my head ached. For my bad shoulder, I needed two ice and E.G.S. (electro-galvanizing stimulation) treatments every day, to kill the pain and maintain mobility. My bad wrist had to be taped to keep a bone chip from aggravating a ganglion cyst. I had sinusitis, and after that one good night’s sleep, I was back to being up most of the night. I was really beginning to feel like Grandpa.

The preliminaries were totally routine—no surprises. I got through it basically on autopilot, and then I won. To me, it was particularly important to win these prelims, especially after what had happened in springboard. I wanted to show the judges that I was still one of the top players. I wasn’t used to being beaten in a major world-class competition, and I didn’t want that to happen again.

Most of the time I looked at my diving as a performance. Part of me was a competitor, but mostly I felt like I was a performer. By the time I got to the finals in the platform diving, I was 90 percent competitor and 10 percent performer. I
had
to be a competitor, because it was going to be very close.

Normally, in a major competition, I would rise quickly to the top of the scoreboard and stay there. But this time, I moved between first and third throughout the whole ten rounds. The real struggle began in the seventh round, when fourteen-year-old Xiong Ni, from China, moved from fourth place to second, and I moved from third to first, leading by only eight points. In the eighth round, Ni took the lead by two points, and increased it to three points with his ninth dive.

I knew all along that it was close, just from the tone of Ron’s instructions to me before each of my dives: “Just do a good dive”; “Just do your normal dive”; “Reach back and go for something special”; or, “Greg, you’ve got to bump it up a notch. Hang in there and keep going.” He never told me that I was in trouble. He never told me I had to win the gold. That was Ron’s philosophy. Just stay focused on letting your ability go, relaxing and doing your best, and the rest would take care of itself. He just kept encouraging me to fight, to keep going for it.

This wasn’t the first time I’d competed against Ni. In the past, I’d always been able to count on his missing at least one of his dives and scoring 4s and 5s. So far he hadn’t missed a single one.

It came down to our final dives. Ni was diving second to last and I was diving last. I knew that I was trailing by three points, because I’d peeked at the scoreboard, which is something I never did. I always tried to do my best and not pay any attention to the scores, but this time I looked when they flashed up all the scores for the last round.

At the ’84 Olympics, before leaving the waiting area to go do a dive, I always rubbed Garvey’s head. Garvey was long gone, but after I hit my head, I received a lot of teddy bears. One of them was a teddy bear with a bandage on his head, and so before I walked over to the platform to prepare for my final dive, I rubbed his bandaged head.

When Ni was on the platform getting ready to do his last dive, I climbed up the stairs to the platform and started giving myself the usual verbal reinforcement: “Relax in your shoulders. You can do it. Believe in yourself.” Then I went through the dive in my mind’s eye to the beat of, as always, “If You Believe”: arms through, strong jump, draw your legs up to your chest into a tight tuck, spot, spot, spot, kick, stretch for the water. “Believe you can go home. Believe you can float on air. Click your heels three times if you believe.”

Ni’s dive was an inward three-and-a-half. I figured he was bound to miss it, but as soon as I heard his entry, I knew that he’d ripped it—no splash at all. He got 8.5s and 9s from the judges, giving him 82.56 points and a total of 637.47. He hadn’t missed a single dive.

My final dive was the reverse three-and-a-half that killed Sergei Shalibashvili in 1983. It had a 3.4 degree of difficulty and was considered the most difficult dive in the sport. Lee Kongzheng from China was the only other diver at the Olympics doing the reverse three-and-a-half in competition—he won the bronze on platform at the ’84 Olympics. Ni’s dive only had a 3.2 degree of difficulty, which meant I had a slight edge. But I was trailing by three points, so I had to do a perfect or near-perfect dive to beat him. I had to get at least the same scores he did. I’d never been that close in a major competition before.

I knew from the expression on Ron’s face that I couldn’t hold anything back. Not that I ever held back—I always went all out— but I really had to give this dive everything and more.

As I climbed the platform, the crowd was going nuts. They were still screaming and hooting and hollering and applauding for Ni. I used to have to remind myself that they were applauding
for
my competitor and not
against
me.

This time I had to narrow my focus and shut everything out. I had to go into my own world: just the pool, the board, and me and Ron. I had to be intensely aware of my body and my timing to make sure that everything was in sync. I couldn’t afford to be distracted by the audience. And I couldn’t let myself think that this was the last dive of my career.

With a reverse three-and-a-half, you go forward and then you spin backward toward the platform. There’s always the danger of hitting the platform, but that wasn’t on my mind. I wasn’t at all afraid of hitting my head. I was afraid of not doing the dive well enough to win.

From the top of the platform, I glanced down at Ron and he gave me a hand signal telling me that we were even, that it was a one-point contest. What he was really thinking was, “Oh my God, we’re behind!” but he didn’t want to add to the pressure. He didn’t realize that I’d already taken a look at the scoreboard, that I knew I was trailing.

As I was getting ready, Ron was looking up at me, visualizing me coming off the platform, doing my dive, and going straight into the water with no splash. He was trying as hard as he could to push that image into my brain. I didn’t know he was doing that, but I could feel how intensely he was watching.

I walked out to the end of the platform and removed the hand towel that Ni had placed on the edge. Some people were having problems with the surface, which was a little slippery, and Ni had been using a towel to give himself surer footing.

I took my chamois and squeezed some water onto my hands and then tossed it down to the deck below. Then I rubbed my hands together to get them equally damp, and rubbed them on my thighs to get off any of the extra moisture. I needed my hands to be damp, because with the reverse three-and-a-half you have to make sure your hands don’t slip off your knees when you grab them. If you slip, which can happen because of the centrifugal force, you’re in deep trouble. You can get pulled right out of your dive.

I got myself set about five steps away from the end, and they announced my dive. I knew at this point that there was a better chance I’d come in second than first. I wasn’t resigned to that possibility, but I considered it briefly. I thought to myself, What’s the worst that can happen? I do a dive that’s not so great and win a silver. I thought about some of the people I’d dived with in the past who would have loved to have won a silver medal.

In the twelve years since I’d won the silver in Montreal, my appreciation of that accomplishment had grown. I was proud of having won the silver, especially at such a young age. That helped make the prospect of winning the silver this time around okay. It would still be a hell of an accomplishment, and it was all right. I prepared myself in case I didn’t win the gold.

As I prepared for the dive, there was one other thing that I took comfort in. Whenever I was in a real tough situation—and this was the toughest situation in my diving career that I’d ever been in—the one thing I always told myself was that no matter what happened, my mother was still going to love me. In that moment, I had an image of my mother sitting at home, watching me on TV. Even if I did a bomb of a dive, she would still say, “Oh, wasn’t that a pretty splash?” That image made me smile and helped me to relax.

I took some comfort in knowing that I wasn’t facing the possibility of coming in second because I’d been diving badly. Ni had done all ten of his dives without missing one, which is incredible to do at the Olympics. Even if I came in second, there would be nothing to be embarrassed about.

And then it was time to dive. I rubbed my face with my hands, and then clasped my hands in front of me and closed my eyes, as if in prayer. A lot of people thought I was praying, but I was actually trying to get focused. Maybe that’s what prayer is. I took a deep breath, and as I exhaled I said to myself, “Breathe, relax, get your arms through.”

I walked out to the end of the platform. Facing the water, I got my feet set, with my big toes barely over the edge. With my arms out in front of me at a forty-five-degree angle to the platform, I checked my body alignment, looking down my arms to the water. As I drew my arms back into my body, I pulled my head up and focused on the edge of the pool, across from where I was standing. I lifted my head just a fraction, to focus about a foot higher than I normally did. By making that adjustment with my head, my weight was pulled back just a little bit more, so when I jumped I’d be closer to the platform. If you jump closer to the platform, you have greater height and more time to execute a good dive. It’s also more dangerous, especially when you make that kind of adjustment in a competition where the pressure is great. I took the chance because I had to do the best dive I possibly could.