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Olympic legend Greg Louganis dives into coaching
(Fullerton,
Calif.) As he grabs a quick bite to eat at a favorite restaurant before
heading off for yet another long afternoon at the pool, Greg Louganis
sits all but unrecognized by scores of fellow diners – and that’s just
fine with the greatest Olympic diver who ever lived.
“I’ve had my day
in the sun as it were,” Louganis chuckles as he swirls the Thai iced
tea in his glass and contemplates something that just a year ago he
never imagined would happen. Louganis, winner of four gold medals and a
silver in three Olympics, has returned to the sport as a coach and
mentor.
And right now there’s barely time for lunch before he has to
jump in his car and head four miles down the road to the Fullerton
College pool. There, on a sun-swept but chilly winter afternoon the
soft-spoken Louganis will start putting a handful of young athletes
through their paces as head coach of a fledgling program called SoCal
Divers.
He’ll have them diving, sure, but he’ll also have them
doing back flips on the ground, handstands, stretching, yoga and
calisthenics. It’s all part of a laid-back but rigorous conditioning
program.
“I want to get your cardiovascular system to where you’re
at a national competition and thousands of people are watching and your
heart isn’t going boom, boom, boom,” he tells 21-year-old Christine
Runkle.
“I don’t know if I’ll ever get to that,” says the
Concordia University senior who is the defending NAIA women’s one-meter
diving champion.
“Sure you will,” Louganis says softly.
After all, he did.
It
will be 23 years this summer since Louganis became the only man in the
sport’s history to win back-to-back Olympic gold medals in both
springboard and platform diving. He likely would have done it three
times had the United States not boycotted the 1980 Olympics.
Then he quietly vanished from the sport upon which he had stamped his name as indelibly as Michael Jordan did on basketball.
Not
that Louganis didn’t keep busy during those years. He’s been a
motivational speaker, made a handful of movies, written a best-selling
memoir called “Breaking the Surface,” even spent two decades training
show dogs.
But until last summer, Louganis said, he never thought
seriously about coaching. Not until Steve Foley, who trains USA Diving’s
best divers, asked him why he hadn’t remained involved with the sport.
“I was never invited,” Louganis says he told him. “Nor did I feel welcome.”
For years he thought that might have something to do with old jealousies.
He
was, after all, the cover boy for U.S. diving in the 1980s, his
handsome face and perfectly sculpted body splashed across so many
magazines that, like Muhammad Ali in boxing, he made it hard to remember
anyone else who competed during his era.
But others, including his former coach, told Louganis there was another, darker reason: It was because he was gay.
“And I’m like `Nooooo!’” Louganis recalls, laughing.
He
really didn’t believe it at first, he adds, or at least he tried not
to. Although he didn’t come out publicly until 1994, a year before
announcing he was also HIV-positive, he says his sexuality was never a
secret to fellow divers.
“You want to give people the benefit of
the doubt,” says Louganis, who for the past several years has lived in
Malibu with his partner, Daniel McSwiney. “But there’s too much evidence
to the contrary that that was the case.”
Foley for his part
prefers not to talk about that, but to note how grateful he is that
Louganis came back. Besides his SoCal Divers duties he’s a mentor to USA
Diving’s coaches and top competitors, helping prepare the next crop of
Olympic divers.
“He’s our Michael Jordan,” Foley says. “He was
expected to win all the time and he did. He’s quite special and amazing
and we want to tap into that `What made you so good?’”
Louganis,
who started dancing when he was a toddler, began gymnastics soon after
and started diving when he was about 8 or 9, has strong opinions about
that.
Coaches across the country, he says, need to start sharing
information on technique and training if America’s best divers are to
reach their full potential.
“A lot of the coaches are rather
insecure about their talent,” he says. “They may have a really talented
diver and it’s like, `Oh, it’s mine, mine, mine. This is my ticket to
the Olympics.’ And that’s not going to get us anywhere.”
Kids,
meanwhile, need to start learning the fundamentals of body awareness and
posture as early as he did, he says. And he also wants them to have a
life away from the pool, stressing community service. That’s why he
hopes the fledgling SoCal Divers, with its 25 members, can eventually
build its own training center.
Chris Mitchell, the CEO of Crown
Acquisitions, a Southern California-based real estate firm, founded the
club and hired Louganis as its coach after a chance meeting last year at
a diving competition.
“We just saw a need for a different type of
environment within the diving world,” one that stressed outside
activities as well as competition, said Mitchell, whose 10-year-old
daughter is a diver. “We discovered Greg felt the exact same way.”
Although
well aware of his stature, Louganis is modest about his
accomplishments. He maintains most of his divers, born after he won his
last gold medal, aren’t impressed by what he achieved.
What
clearly does impress them is that, at age 51, Louganis is still trim,
muscular and appears to be in better shape than they are.
“Let’s
do some handstands,” he says to Runkle and 17-year-old Clay Pinckney, a
two-time high school diving champion who plans to compete at Duke
University next year.
Keeping up a steady patter of small talk, he
outlasts them both, only coming down to retrieve keys that have fallen
out of his pocket.
When he was diagnosed with HIV in 1988 Louganis
wasn’t sure he’d still be alive in 2011, let alone doing handstands.
That’s one reason he jumped at the long-delayed opportunity to coach.
“I’m
thankful, well, for one thing, to still be here,” he says. “But also to
see the value of what I have to offer. … I don’t want this knowledge
and experience to be lost.”
Enjoyed the update on Greg.