A SOARING, MAJESTIC SLOWNESS

By John Show

That describes Greg Louganis, the class of a classy field

This is the measure of Greg Louganis of the U.S. in a diving competition: after the other best male divers in the world--gifted, graceful, beautifully muscled athletes--have tied the ends of the limits of possibility into bowknots and arrowed into the pool with only the most demure of splashes, Louganis then shows how it should be done. He dives last in each round because he qualifies in first place. Because he can jump higher than any other diver (his vertical leap has been measured at 33 in.), he hangs in the air longer before he begins to fall toward the water. Quickness is the special talent of divers; their spins and somersaults are conjuring tricks that confuse the eye. Louganis alone is able to go beyond such dazzle to a majestic slowness that is no trick, but true magic. The most ignorant of spectators sees Louganis go off a springboard and thinks, "Oh, that's what it's all about." The experts are awed.

Dr. Sammy Lee, who won Olympic golds for the U.S. in platform diving in 1948 and '52, and who coached Louganis from '74 to '77, says, "I have been around diving for 50 years, and no one I have seen, past or present, or whom I see coming up in the future, will equal Greg's performance." Tan Liangde, the flashingly acrobatic 19-year-old Chinese who came in second to Louganis in the Olympic springboard competition last week, laughed aloud at the silliness of the question when someone asked him whether the American could be beaten. "No," he said, and then added, no doubt with some Asian equivalent of crossed fingers, "not at this moment." Louganis, 24, says revealingly that he does not think of diving as a competition-unless he makes a rare blunder, he has no competition-but as a difficult performance, to be done in order to give the greatest pleasure possible. He prefers outdoor meets, like the one last week at the Olympics, "because of the blue sky." Of course: the sky is a splendid stage setting.

Closer to earth and water, however, there was plenty of spectacular diving competition at the Games. Since 1980, China has been sending powerful men's and women's diving teams, perhaps the best in the world, to international meets. They specialize in acrobatics and "ripped" entries --eerily splashless plunges that make a sound like ripping cloth, in which the hands and arms drill a hole in the water for the body to follow. At first the American women, traditionally the world's best, could not match these elegant entries. They learned soon enough, but the Chinese kept improving too. As the Olympic women's springboard finals began, the question was whether Li Yihua, 21, or Li Qiaoxian, 16, the two slim, graceful Chinese divers, could take the gold over two Americans: Kelly McCormick, 24, daughter of Pat McCormick, who won springboard and platform golds in both 1952 and '56, and Chris Seufert, 27, veteran of the U.S. Olympic boycott team of 1980.

While onlookers placed their mental bets, a slight, pretty, 20-year-old Canadian named Sylvie Bernier found a new consistency to support her delicate and precise style, and took the lead midway through the competition. McCormick, who had overrotated and made a splashing entry on her eighth dive, a reverse 2 1/2 somersault with a tuck, which had given her trouble before, had a chance to win the gold with a superlative score on her tenth and last dive. ("Divin' is just landin' on your head ten times out of ten," she had said after the preliminary round, in her husky, Dead End Kid's voice.) She stood there on the 3-meter board, hands on hips, gathering herself. Then she marched sturdily to the end of the board, turned, stood motionless and threw a back 2 1/2 that missed high excellence by an ounce or two of rebounding water. Bernier won the gold by 530.70 to 527.46. Seufert, who had overcome a shaky start, won the bronze. Li Yihua and Li Qiaoxian wound up fourth and fifth.

Three days later, after Louganis had won his gold and Ron Merriott, 24, of the U.S. had followed Tan Liangde's silver with a bronze, springboard diving gave way to platform competition. The contrast is sharp and fascinating. The best parallel in sport may be to skiing. Springboard diving, like slalom racing, requires great agility and tuning as the diver catches the flex of the board and rides it for maximum spring. Platform diving is like downhill racing, a dangerous, gut-sucking plunge that seems insane to onlookers and sometimes to participants. The concrete platform, of course, does not bounce. It just stands there, 10 meters (33 ft., or three stories) in the air. The drop Blocks perilous and it is.

Neither McCormick nor Seufert slacks courage, but each has dropped out of platform diving. McCormick once ticked the 10-meter platform with one leg after taking off, and "lost the water" (lost track of her position in the air). She landed badly, and the impact enlarged what she figures was a small cut on her shin to an ugly eight-inch gash, whose scar is still there. Seufert bruised the back of her neck severely in hitting the water on a 10-meter dive, later reinjured herself the same way, and eventually noticed a tingling in her fingers. A neurologist told her that if she continued to land on her neck, not her head, she could become paralyzed.

All the women on the U.S. team admit that there is a "fear factor" to 10-meter competition. Wendy Wyland, a compact, agile, formidably confident 19-year-old who was the current world champion as competition started, talks of her "cat sense," and says that she has never for so much as an instant been lost in the air. Nevertheless, her fear of losing her orientation in mid-dive is so great that she seeks help for it from a sports psychologist who is on call to the team. Michele Mitchell, 22, missed her hand grab (divers clasp their hands as they enter the water, then let go) while practicing 10-meter dives last winter. Her right shoulder "jerked around somewhere behind me," and eventually required surgery. She was out of action for 4 1/2 months.

Such stories were hard to forget on prelim day as, one by one, 21 young women, sacrificial maidens in imagination, skipped lightly to the edge of the tower and cast themselves off. There were sloppy landings, but no disastrous ones, though Mitchell stopped hearts when she balked on her first try at a platform-edge arm stand. Two nerveless Chinese, Zhou Jihong, 19, and Chen Xiaoxia, 22, qualified one-two, with Mitchell and Wyland coming in three and five. Zhou and Chen barely disturbed the water as they dove. "They are so flat!" McCormick had said admiringly a couple of days before. Apparently breasts and hips are streamlining flaws for women divers.

In the next day's finals, first Chen and then Zhou held the lead. Mitchell nailed a running forward 3 1/2 with a tuck on which she "almost broke the end off the platform" getting her initial spring, as she says she tends to do. She passed Chen, China's top platform expert, but Zhou held steady. In the seventh of eight rounds, Wyland passed Chen for third with a snappy back 2 1/2 pike (legs extended, hands touching toes) and held it on the last dive for the bronze. Mitchell gained points when Zhou splashed her last entry, but not enough of them. Zhou won by 435.51 to Mitchell's 431.19. It was China's first gold medal in diving.

For all the success of Bernier and Zhou, no woman outclassed the field the way Louganis did. He had dominated his sport, seemingly without effort, since the great Klaus Dibiasi of Italy retired in 1976. Dibiasi, whose natural rip entry was a marvel in its time, won his third Olympic gold in platform diving in that year. The silver medalist in those Games was 16-year-old Greg Louganis. "I went around Montreal with my eyes bugged out and my jaw dragging on the ground," he recalled last week. Since then the eyes of his judges and competitors have bugged out. The Chinese are known to have studied tapes of Louganis, though a major factor in his success--his remarkable physical beauty--is not readily imitated. It is widely assumed that he takes the lead in any competition simply by putting on swim trunks.

He gets his deep chest and glowing bronze skin from a Samoan father (he was adopted as a baby by Peter and Frances Louganis, then of El Cajon, Calif., to whom he refers fondly as "my real parents"). His shoulders are broad and his waist is narrow, and his thighs flare as if he were wearing riding breeches. As Louganis prepares to dive, he seems taller than his 5 ft. 9 in. Years of dance lessons have toughened his legs and refined his natural grace. It is clear that something, possibly the experience of overcoming childhood dyslexia and stuttering, has given him impressive poise and an unusual degree of self-knowledge.

This assurance has not come easily; until a couple of years ago, he was so shy that he could hardly bring himself to talk, even to his old friend Sammy Lee. Says he: "People didn't know how to take me, and I didn't know how to take them, so we never said anything to each other." Now he appears at press conferences in the company of Gar, a Teddy bear given to him by the wife of his coach Ron O'Brien, and explains to puzzled reporters that his mental preparation begins with finding the "rhythm of the day; it could be upbeat or melancholy" and flowing with it. Sometimes, in his mind, he sets his dives to music: the Chariots of Fire theme, or some such.

Otherwise, his major problem, which he solves adroitly, is to fend off adulation. He is the only diver in history ever to receive perfect scores of 10 from all seven judges on a single dive (in 1982 at the world swimming championships in Guayaquil, Ecuador), and the only one to score more than 700 in a competition (most recently in the springboard finals last week, when he scored 754.41). He is asked, by journalists who sound serious, why he is better at his sport than any other Olympic athletes are at theirs (Carl who?). This gentlest of champions throws up his hands, smiles ruefully at the nonsense of it, and says, "Ask my mother."

By the last days of competition, Louganis had not said how much longer he would continue to dive, though he did say he had "many other things" on his mind, including an acting career. In the meantime, there was one final Olympic event, the 10-meter platform. His most important rivals were the Chinese, of course, and his own teammate Bruce Kimball, son of Team Coach Dick Kimball. Bruce, 21, is a gritty and talented diver who has brought himself back to top form after a serious auto accident in 1981. He is the only man to have beaten Louganis recently (at Gainesville, Fla., in April). If Greg were to hear the wrong rhythm on the closing day of the Games, Kimball would have a fair shot at the gold. More likely, Kimball and the Chinese faced the familiar wry pleasure of hearing one of the authentic geniuses of sport invent a new way of saying "Aw, shucks." --By John Show. Reported by Melissa Ludke/Los Angeles

With reporting by Melissa Ludtke