FU'S GOLDS AFTER HER TWO VICTORIES IN ATLANTA, 17-YEAR-OLD FU MINGXIA OF CHINA IS ON COURSE TO BECOME THE BEST EVER IN HER SPORT
She was a talented child in Barcelona, 13 years old, throwing
herself from the 10-meter platform, flipping and falling,
twisting her body into extravagant knots and escaping at the end
for straight-down perfect landings in the water. Look at me.
Look at me. She was the five-foot-tall, 93-pound daughter of
the guests in the next room at some global Holiday Inn,
delighting everyone gathered around the pool as she became the
youngest platform diver to win an Olympic gold medal.
No more. Fu Mingxia is four years older and two inches taller
and nearly 30 pounds heavier, and while at first glance she may
resemble some talented elf in flight, she has become one of the
grand athletes of our time.
By winning both the platform and the three-meter gold medals
last week in the late-night spotlights at the Georgia Tech
Aquatic Center, she put herself on a course to become the most
successful diver in history. She is the first woman since East
Germany's Ingrid Kramer in 1960 to win both events in a single
Olympics, and with three gold medals, total, Fu is only one gold
behind the record of four shared by Pat McCormack and Greg
Louganis, both of the U.S.
Look at me, indeed. She is only two medals shy of the record for
total diving medals of any denomination, five, which is shared
by Louganis and Klaus Dibiasi of Italy. Seventeen years old.
Louganis and Dibiasi were 28 when they got their final medals.
"In 1992, I was a little girl," Fu, the daughter of a factory
worker and an accountant in Wuhan, said last week. "Now I am
grown. I am heavier and stronger, but I do not think that has
affected my performance. I will go ahead, step by step, and see
what happens."
Her performances, added to the men's springboard win of
22-year-old Xiong Ni, who was first seen as a 14-year-old
finishing second by only 1.14 points to Louganis in Seoul in
1988, gave China diving dominance in Atlanta. Only a victory by
Russian favorite Dmitri Sautin in the final event, the men's
platform, thwarted a Chinese sweep. China could have become the
first country to win all four events since the U.S. did so in '52.
American divers landed with a thud. Or maybe a splat. This was
the first time since 1912, not counting 1980, when the U.S.
boycotted the Games, that American divers did not win at least
one gold medal. Mary Ellen Clark (platform) and Mark Lenzi
(springboard) took bronze.
"The Chinese work harder," Sautin says. "I work maybe five hours
a day, every day of the week. The Chinese, I hear, work eight
hours. Perhaps that is why they win more than their share of
the competitions."
Fu says she worked seven hours a day, six days a week to prepare
for the Olympics. Her only activities besides training were
"listening to music, watching television and getting massages."
The top U.S. divers practice 24 hours a week at most.
"I don't know how the Chinese do it," says Scott Donie of the
U.S., who finished fourth in the springboard. "In my biggest
workouts, just when I was starting, I wouldn't do more than 100
dives in a day. Now, I don't do more than 40. It becomes a case
of keeping yourself together, staying fit. I guess everyone has
their own way of doing things."
The finals of each event started late, at 10 p.m., a sort of
strange digestif after a full day of Olympic sports. Demands by
NBC--if you want live prime-time coverage, you'd better start
after track and field is finished--converted the sport into a
lead-in to the local news and Jay Leno's nightly monologue. And
with the 12 finalists doing five or six dives rather than the
traditional eight to 11 (depending on the event and the
athletes' gender), the typical program lasted only an hour.
Nearly 12,000 spectators paid $64 to $159 apiece on four nights
for what was one of the priciest events per minute on the
Olympic calendar.
"It has been hard," one Russian coach said of the late starts.
"Inconvenient. You have to change your whole training schedule
for this. You have to train for when the competition is, 10
o'clock at night."
Coming into the springboard finals on July 31 already the winner
of the platform, Fu faced assorted difficulties. She was fourth
in the finals field after morning preliminaries, trailing Vera
Ilyina of Russia, 14-year-old Anna Lindberg of Sweden and Olena
Zhupyna of the Ukraine. She also was her country's only hope.
In a startling moment in the preliminaries, Fu's teammate Tan
Shuping, the three-meter springboard gold medalist two years ago
in the world championships in Rome, landed a flat-out belly flop
on her third dive. Her scores across the judging board were 0.5,
0.5, 1.0, 0.5, 0.5, 0.5 and 0.5, and they dropped her from third
in the standings to 25th. She effectively was eliminated from
the finals with that one dive. "I would never have expected
something like that," said Melissa Moses, a U.S. diver who
finished fourth in the event. "I've never seen her do that in
practice, much less in competition."
Fu simply forgot about Tan's disaster and everything else. She
forgot about the large American crowd that cheered every
American somersault and twist, and hooted everyone who didn't
think each U.S. dive was perfect. She forgot about the time. She
forgot about the circumstances. By the second of the five dives,
she had become the leader. She never faltered, the only diver to
receive more than 60 points on each of her dives. Look at me.
"What would you like to do when you are older, say 30?" she was
asked afterward.
Thirty? It was clear the question never had arisen. Or at least
not seriously. The giggler of Barcelona--she hadn't been able to
stop laughing when she listened through ear plugs to the
questions translated into Mandarin--now sat at the press
conference podium with a certain composure. Well, a certain
composure and a stuffed replica of Izzy, the Olympic mascot, in
her lap.
"I don't know," the best diver in the world said. "Maybe I'll be
a coach? I don't know."
The child of Barcelona will have just turned 22 in Sydney.
COLOR PHOTO: MANNY MILLAN Having worked out seven hours a day six days a week, Fu was nearly flawless off the platform. [Fu Mingxia diving]
