Gay Swimmer Matthew Mitcham Will Not Defend Tittle
Like Bolt here in London, Louganis earned legendary status when he completed the springboard-platform double-double at the 1984 and 1988 Olympics. Indeed, it's generally accepted he was robbed of a Phelps-like triple-double by the American boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics.
Yet even though he is regarded as the greatest diver of all time, Louganis nonetheless counts Mitcham as kinfolk, both members of the exclusive family of Olympic platform champions. And it hurt him to see a great champion fall in this manner, diving under-prepared because of a torn abdominal muscle that played havoc with his build-up to these Games and then placing 13th, agonisingly missing out on the Olympic final by only one spot. "That's a heartbreak," Louganis told The Australian at the end of the semi-finals session at the London Olympic pool. "He's had a rough year with injuries and all that. These things happen. My heart goes out to him.”
It wasn't just Louganis who was touched by Mitcham's brave but unequal fight to defend his Olympic crown. So too were his fellow competitors, who took turns at the end of the competition to give the red-eyed Australian a consoling hug. "I felt sad for him as well," Germany's Sascha Klein said after advancing to the final.
"I just told him he's a great diver and he has to go on."
Happily, that's advice Mitcham looks like taking, although perhaps not quite in the manner Klein had in mind. The German surely intended that Mitcham should get his body right and then return to the fray to reclaim his standing as the world's best platform diver, but Mitcham has basically accepted that this can't and won't happen.
Every dive from the 10m tower ends in a 60km/h collision with the water, which is not nearly as giving and forgiving as one might think. Eventually that battering took its toll, said Steve Foley, the former Australian diving head coach but now the high-performance director of the US team.
"It might only be 60km/h but it feels like 100km/h," Foley said. "And they've added an extra somersault since my day, when I used to come out of my spins fairly early and could sight my entry. These guys now are opening up a lot closer to the water and there are far more injuries now off the tower than ever before."
Mitcham, understandably, has had enough of the incessant pounding and had gone to London pretty much convinced that he and his body couldn't take much more. But then he felt his love of the Olympic Games reignited, so much so that he never wants to miss another one of them. That means either joining the dread ranks of those reporting on his sport, or continuing in it, almost certainly in the shape-shifting role of a springboard diver.
"I've always been a platform specialist who's done springboard either to fill spots or because I was semi-OK at it," Mitcham said. "So I have been in discussion with Chava (Sobrino), my coach, about the possibility of becoming solely a springboard diver. It's certainly a possibility and I'm not really going to take a holiday when I get home. I'm actually going to start working on the strength to become a springboard diver right away because it's going to take a long time to get my thighs as big as (China's) He Chong's."
Switching from tower specialist to springboard diving is the equivalent of an English writer switching to writing in French. Both use words but the language is entirely different and -- although Foley was fluent in both, the first Australian ever to qualify for both the tower and springboard finals at the one Olympics, 1984 -- he recognises how difficult it will be for Mitcham to master the new discipline."It certainly won't be easy," Foley said. "He would definitely need to do some strength work on his legs to get high off the board. And then there are the dives they are doing today -- forward 4 1/2 somersaults, inward 3 1/2 somersaults."
Throughout his Olympic diving career, stretching from Montreal to Los Angeles, the range of degree of difficulty in Foley's list of dives went from a modest 1.6 to 2.9. Mitcham, forced because of his abdominal muscle tear to restrict himself to "simpler" dives, ranged from 3.0-3.6 in his tower list. Russian Ilya Zakharov, who surprisingly beat He for the 3m gold here last week, worked off the most difficult list ever taken into an Olympic springboard final. His simplest dive had a tariff of 3.4. His most complicated, a forward 2 1/2 somersault triple twister, is rated 3.9.
Mitcham has some history on springboard, a semi-finalist in Beijing on 3m, a bronze medallist on 1m at the Rome world championships in 2009. But the move he now has in mind not only requires him to master a new discipline but master it to a level not seen before.
theaustralian.com.au
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