In fall 2000, I had a good friend whose family won diving lessons in an auction. She was the same age as I was, and her sister played soccer with my sister. Our families were close. They invited me to come along for the diving lessons.
Water was already a big part of my life. Though I never competed in swimming, I took swimming lessons, and our family swam a lot for fun. We went regularly to a lake near our home to go boating. I loved the water, but diving just hadn’t been on my radar.
My first lesson was on a 1-meter springboard with a coach who wore yellow sunglasses. He took me through a couple of different techniques and taught me a forward one-and-a-half flip for the first time.
Hey, this isn’t that bad, I thought. I discovered that diving was quite similar to gymnastics. I got to flip through the air, which was fun. I got to be acrobatic. In essence, diving was gymnastics over water, with the main difference being that I was now landing on my head instead of on my feet. I loved the thrill that came with the free fall and the adrenaline that surged through my body when I flipped through the air.
I also liked the team aspect. In gymnastics, there was only one other boy on my team, so I was a bit lonely. Diving gave me an opportunity to compete with more team members.
Here’s what I didn’t love: the terrible suits divers have to wear. My first day of diving I cringed at the thought of wearing briefs like that. Everyone makes fun of the “Speedo guy” at the beach, and rightfully so. Likewise, my friends and I used to make fun of divers and their ittybitty briefs. So let’s just get that out of the way right now. The suits are awful, even if they do help with mobility in flipping and twisting. Swimming trunks are too restrictive for such movements, so divers have no choice but to wear briefs. But it doesn’t make them any less terrible.
The required apparel notwithstanding, I went back again to the lessons. And again. I began to see improvement in the pool, and I fed off that sense of progression. I continued with my lessons, and I eventually began to compete. I don’t remember much about my first diving competition or how I actually fared, except that it took place at the high school in the town next to ours. They required us to fill out a sheet with the list of dives we were going to do in the competition. I had to learn a whole new set of lingo.
For example, all dives fall into one of six categories:
Reverse and inward dives are the most dangerous ones because you’re spinning back toward the board. Typically, if a diver hits the board or the platform, it’s during a dive from one of those two categories. When Greg Louganis hit his head on the board in the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, that was a reverse/gainer. He began the dive facing forward and flipped backward, but he didn’t get far enough away from the board on his launch.
Within each category, another number designates how many half somersaults or half twists you do. A front one-and-a-half would be 103 (1 for front and 3 for the number of half flips). A front double would be 104.
But it gets more complex than that. At the end of each dive number is the position in which you are doing the dive. A is for straight, B is for pike, C is for tuck, and D is for free. A tuck is when you fold your knees into your shoulders, making a ball with your body. A pike is when you bring your legs straight toward your face. Your knees are by your face, but your legs are completely straight.
In Olympic diving, you rarely see an A. So a front dive pike would be 101B. If the announcer says a diver is doing a 101C, that’s a front dive in the tuck position. A back armstand, which is only done on platform, double two-and-a-half twist would be 6245 (6 for armstand, 2 for backward, 4 for the number of half flips, and 5 for the number of half twists). Yes, it’s difficult to understand sometimes, but that shows the complexity of the sport.
For divers, coaches, officials, judges, commentators, and anybody else involved in a meet, looking at the combination of numbers and letters will let them know exactly what a diver is doing. In Olympic competition, men perform six dives while women do five dives. There’s also a formula that measures how hard a dive is: that’s your degree of difficulty, or DD. A complex and elaborate formula determines how difficult a dive is based on all the dive’s components.
In scoring, judges typically look at three things: takeoff, midair position, and entry into the water. A diver’s takeoff needs to be the correct distance from the board or platform—not too close, not too far away. The midair position should be clean and tight. For example, in the pike position, the knees can’t be bent. Toes must always be pointed, and divers have to look like they’re in control of the dive.
The entry is the most important part as far as judging goes; judges often weigh more of their scores on the entry. A clean entry with no splash at all will usually result in a higher score than a dive with an amazing takeoff and gorgeous midair position but a heavier entry.
If you finish a dive high and have a clean entry, judges love that. It shows you have power from your takeoff that translates into the air and that you control your lineup into the water. Position going into the water must be vertical. It’s better to be “short” on a dive (meaning you haven’t gotten to the vertical point yet) rather than “over,” (meaning you’ve gone past the vertical point).
Scores range from 0 to 10 in half-point increments. Dives that score 10 are considered to be excellent dives, while 8.5–9.5 are very good, 7–8 are good, 5–6.5 are satisfactory, 2.5–4.5 are deficient, .5–2 are unsatisfactory, and 0 is a completely failed dive. Multiple judges score a dive and provide the raw score. The raw score is the total after a certain number of judges’ marks are thrown out (this number varies based on the competition level). To give the final score for the dive, the raw score is then multiplied by the degree of difficulty.
If all that sounds like gibberish to you, that’s understandable. It was gibberish to me, too, when I started.
I wasn’t an outstanding diver at first. By no means was I any kind of prodigy. Thomas Finchum, who would later be my Olympic synchronized diving partner, was the one who was the prodigy. We practiced together regularly, and I was always in Thomas’s shadow, but he was encouraging to me and was quick to tell people how good I was going to be.
I didn’t make nationals the winter after I started diving competitively, even though the rest of my teammates did. The following summer, however, I advanced to nationals for the first time. My drive to win was powerful. It’s why I kept working at it even when I wasn’t succeeding. I knew my gymnastics background gave me a strong base to build on, and I knew I should have been able to excel in diving. So I kept at it.
As a teenager, I’d spend hours each day working to improve. In addition to the work I did in the pool at the Indiana University Natatorium in downtown Indianapolis, practice consisted of heavy conditioning work such as cardio, circuit training, and weight training. But the closest thing to diving on land was the belt and harness system that was usually suspended over a trampoline or over mats. Once I attached the belt and harness and hooked up the ropes, the coach would pull me through each dive using a pulley system. That setup allowed me to practice and hone the movements and the mechanics that are necessary to execute each dive. If I was nervous about a dive, the belt and harness gave me more of a feel for it and let me repeat it over and over. Working on dry ground let me get more repetitions than I would get in the pool. The nice thing about it was the safety system: I didn’t fall flat on my face if I messed up.
The bad part about it was how tedious it was. I’d have to repeat the same jumps, the same small movements again and again. I always wanted to do the bigger dives, and I hated having to work on the details so much. Yet years later, I can still hear my coach repeating, “Details make champions.”
As for conditioning, flexibility and core work were the keys. Flexibility wasn’t a strength of mine in the early years of diving, but I knew I’d have to pursue it if I wanted to be a better diver. So I’d lie in bed at night doing the side splits, often falling asleep in that position.
My parents made significant sacrifices to help me pursue my dreams. Lessons for both gymnastics and diving are expensive, and that’s why my mom began working for my gymnastics coach and the club’s management—so I could train for free. But my sisters were involved with sports as well, and those didn’t come with discounts. Money was tight.
My mom sacrificed a lot of her time for me. Once I started diving, I was practicing five or six days a week in Indianapolis at a pool about an hour away from home. Mom set up carpools with another diver so they could share the transportation time and expense. She would drive us to practice, and the other mom would drive us home. That was still a two-hour commitment from her each day, just to drive me to practice.
Sometimes, though, the carpool wouldn’t work out for one reason or another. On those days, she’d pick me up at school at two in the afternoon, drive an hour to practice, stay there with me for about four hours, and then drive an hour home. That was six hours of her day that she wasn’t spending at home with my sisters or my dad. Mom really had to give up a lot of her time for me to train, and I can’t tell you how grateful I am for her efforts.
My sisters like to joke now that our childhood was all about me. The basement of our house was almost a shrine to my achievements and accolades. They tease, “Oh, this entire big wall here is dedicated to David’s accomplishments. But look, here’s Shauni’s little corner, and here’s Shaila’s little corner.” I’m sure they must have felt some animosity earlier in our childhood, but they never expressed it or joked with me about it until we grew closer after we grew up. They, too, had to make sacrifices for me, and I am thankful for their graciousness.
Our family life almost always revolved around sporting events. Shaila stopped playing sports when she went to high school, but Shauni was sold out to soccer. She was good enough to play collegiately for an NCAA Division I school, so she was traveling almost nonstop with her high school team. She often got rides to games and practices with teammates because Mom was busy transporting me to practice. We occasionally had schedule conflicts between my schedule and Shauni’s, but we accommodated them the best we could.
When I was younger, my family had dinner together almost every night. But the older I got, the more family meals decreased in frequency. Diving practice consumed almost all my high school years, making it necessary for me to eat on the road or whenever I could grab a bite. I spent lots of time with my mom driving back and forth to practice, but our family time as a whole took a major hit once I began diving more.
The more I improved, the more devoted I became to diving. My dry-ground-training facility on the west side of Indianapolis was located at an old mental hospital about ten minutes away from the IU Natatorium where I did my water practices. Back in the 1950s, the state lost funding for the hospital and shut it down. My coach acquired this spot for our training in the basement of one of the buildings on the hospital campus.
The previous tenants had pretty much walked away leaving everything intact, so every time I walked down to the basement I’d go past desks and overturned filing cabinets. The basement was home to a huge, open gym that we turned into our own space by bringing in mats, trampolines, diving boards, exercise equipment, harnesses, and everything we needed in order to train.
Upstairs on the main level was more of a classroom setting. One of the rooms up there had a huge diving library with videos from every major competition—the Olympics, the world cup, the world championships, and on and on. I checked out videos constantly and watched them repeatedly, analyzing and dissecting the technique of the world’s greatest divers and trying to figure out what made them so good.
Still, as committed as I was to improving, training wasn’t always easy. At times it was downright petrifying—especially when I had to attempt the 10-meter platform. I’d been diving for a couple of years when the time came to make this progression. In the Olympics, the diving events are the 3-meter springboard and the 10-meter platform. Typically the older divers excel at the 3-meter because they’re bigger and stronger and can push the board down more, thus propelling them higher on their dives. The younger divers are usually the best at the 10-meter platform. So my coach thought it was time for me to begin learning it. And I wanted to learn it. Well, sometimes . . .
The fact is, ten meters is the equivalent of a three-story building. Jumping from that high into a pool would be terrifying for just about anyone, even if you’ve spent years preparing for it. And I had. My diving lessons moved me incrementally higher toward the 10-meter goal, so it’s not as if I were going straight from 1 meter to 10. I had mastered 7.5 meters without too much trouble.
But the 10-meter was another issue altogether. That was the highest platform in the building. I knew I could get hurt from that high. The immediate risk is on the takeoff, when you have to make sure that you clear the platform. You have to jump far enough out that you don’t hit your arm, your leg, or your head, because that can cause serious injury. In 1983, Soviet diver Sergei Chalibashvili died after hitting his head on the platform while attempting a three-and-a-half reverse somersault tuck. I’m thankful I’ve never experienced anything like that. I’ve never torn my shoulder or broken any bones. I have, however, hit the platform a couple of times with my fingers and toes, which breaks the skin and causes abrasions.
Another risk is the water itself. At that height, the water is not anything close to soft. Hitting the water from ten meters is like hitting a ton of bricks. When I was first learning to dive from ten meters, I smacked the water a lot—a back smack, a belly smack, a leg smack, and so forth. Smacking is what happens when you don’t enter the water cleanly. It absolutely annihilates you when you do that, and it makes you not want to climb up that platform ever again. The pain is intense.
I often woke up in the morning with bruises from smacking the day before. It was kind of a joke around the pool that the next day we wanted to see each other’s bruises from our smacks. I’ve seen divers whose backs have bled from smacking the water. Sometimes you can even see the imprint of a ripple of water on a diver’s leg or back after they smack.
By the time I started diving from ten meters, I’d seen other divers get hurt from that height, and I’d experienced the pain myself from failed dives at lower heights. Plus, I knew if I didn’t execute a dive properly and smacked the water, I’d be embarrassed in front of everybody. I developed a healthy fear and respect for that height that I still have today.
I’d learn the dives in practice outside the pool, but when it came time to perform them from the platform, I wouldn’t do them. I’d dillydally in the stairwell, killing time until practice was over. Or, at worst, I’d bawl my eyes out because I was so scared. Crying was my last resort to get out of the dive. I was usually pretty guarded about other people seeing me cry, so I didn’t shed tears that often. That should tell you how petrified I was. Sometimes on the way to practice I’d make excuses to my mom as to why I couldn’t go that day: “I don’t feel well” or “I’m too tired.”
This went on for a while, until my mom started offering incentives. She offered me a CD if I’d just do the dive I had been practicing. After much cajoling and encouraging from my mom and my coach, John Wingfield, I eventually took the plunge. I don’t remember much about that very first dive from ten meters, but my fear of the platform continued to plague me for years. Eventually a sports psychologist helped me conquer most of my fear and taught me how to be more structured in my mental approach. The mental aspect to diving is the most important part of the sport. If you’re not able to master your emotions and control your thinking, you won’t be a successful diver. The physical component is obviously crucial, but the mental component separates the good divers from the great ones.
In fact, my work with a sports psychologist was pivotal for my career. The insights I gained from him were invaluable. With his help, I learned to set goals—both goals for the training process and goals for the outcome. Ultimately, my goal was to get to the Olympics. That was my outcome goal. Once I had identified that outcome goal, I set it aside and focused instead on the process goals—the little goals along the way designed to help me get to the outcome goal. The principle is that the more detailed the goals, the more achievable they become, and the more one accomplishes in return. Remember what my coach always said? “Details make champions.”
When it came to the 10-meter platform, one of my process goals was to conquer that fear and take another step toward my goal of the Olympics. Now, how would I accomplish that process goal? I set more process goals. I learned relaxation exercises and began to visualize the dives in my head. The relaxation techniques helped me learn to control my heart rate and keep my anxiety level low. One of my former gymnastics coaches also helped with the visualization component by suggesting that I draw out the motions of my 10-meter dives. So that’s what I did. I took a pen and paper and drew the dives, move by move, as I saw them in my head.
My mom’s incentive tactics worked only so long. As I progressed as a diver, I needed a stronger motivation to get me off that platform and into the water. I vividly remember standing on the 10-meter platform, looking down at the rest of the divers doing their work at different levels and thinking to myself, What am I doing now that’s going to get me to where I want to be? If I want to make the Olympic Games, then what am I doing right now that’s going to help accomplish that?
Walking down the stairs and refusing to take the plunge wasn’t going to help me achieve my goal. I had to push through my fear and the lies I had believed. I had to push past the thought that I wasn’t ready, that my coach didn’t have my best interests at heart, that I would forget everything I had learned, and get off the platform. That realization was critical for my career. These techniques didn’t work every time; I didn’t get over my fear immediately. Gradually, though, it became easier and easier to make those dives. I wish I could say that such fear is now a thing of the past, but it’s not. Especially if I haven’t dived for a while, I still experience a twinge of timidity when I step onto that platform. I don’t think it will ever go away completely.
There are two types of fear: healthy and unhealthy. Healthy fear prevents you from doing things that might harm yourself or others. That’s good fear. But the other kind of fear, the unhealthy kind, comes from a place that it took me a long time to identify. When we worry about something that might happen, we tend to doubt God’s goodness and his sovereignty, his control over everything. At its root, fear is a failure to trust in God. I often have to remind myself of that when I’m tempted to let fear take root in my heart.
I was making progress in individual competition. At the Speedo National Diving Championships (those suits again!) in 2003, I placed nineteenth on the 1-meter, twelfth on the 3-meter, and second on the 10-meter. At the same event the following year, I moved up to fourth in the 1-meter and second on the 3-meter. I dropped one place to third in the 10-meter.
In the synchronized diving competition, though, the results were even better. Synchronized diving, or “synchro,” is the event where two divers compete as a team. You do almost the exact same dives as in individual competition, but right next to your teammate. The goal is for the two divers to be perfectly synchronized so they look like one diver going into the water.
Thomas Finchum was my first synchronized diving partner. We started working together in 2002, but by 2003 we were one of the most promising teams of young divers in the country. We placed seventh in the Speedo National Diving Championships in 2003 and improved on that in 2004, finishing fifth in the FINA Diving World Cup Trials and third in the Speedo American Cup.
USA Diving is the nonprofit organization that powers and organizes American competitive diving and prepares teams for competition. It periodically changes how divers can qualify for the Olympics and even the Olympic Trials, and I don’t remember what the criteria were at the time. We probably had to place in the top three in the Speedo American Cup, which is a big senior-level meet, or in the top seven at a national championship. However it happened, Thomas and I qualified for the Olympic Trials in 2004, when I was fifteen.
Honestly, we were surprised that we had made it to the trials. We didn’t think we were a strong enough team to be there. But we knew this was an opportunity to gain valuable experience that could help us in our efforts to qualify for the Beijing Olympics in 2008. In the 2004 trials, we had absolutely no plans or expectations that we would advance to the Olympics. Those trials were simply process goals.
On any given day in the sport of diving, you can bomb, or you can dive amazingly well and do better than anyone expects. That’s what happened with Thomas and me during the trials. After the preliminaries, we were only six points away from first place, and the first-place team was going to the Olympics. Six points, by the way, is a tiny margin. It’s the difference of pointing your toe harder or going in the water two degrees more vertical. It’s miniscule.
We had another good day in the finals, but the team of Mark Ruiz and Kyle Prandi fared a little bit better. They widened the gap and won the competition while we finished third. We hadn’t qualified for the Olympics, but I was ecstatic with the result. We had done far more than we set out to do, and we had surprised a lot of people in the process. Those 2004 Olympic Trials were a jump-start to my diving career. They transformed me from being a decent diver into being an Olympic-caliber diver. From that point forward, the 2008 Olympics weren’t just a pipe dream. They were well within my grasp, and I knew it.
The sad part about it was that even if we had won the competition, I probably would have been disqualified shortly thereafter. The Olympic drug testing would have been my undoing.