Flight And Fall Biography Gives Startling Look Behind Facade Of Olympic Champion
“Breaking The Surface” By Greg Louganis with Eric Marcus (Random House: $23; 290 pp.)
Millions of us were shocked to learn recently that Olympic diving hero Greg Louganis has AIDS and that he was aware of his HIVpositive status at the Olympic Games in Seoul, South Korea, in 1988. As the story broke, the overriding focus was on Greg’s crisis of conscience after he split his head open on the 3-meter board in a preliminary round.
Commentators have been asking: Shouldn’t he have told someone, as a trace of his blood fanned into the diving pool, to protect the other divers from infection?
Shouldn’t he have told the doctor who stitched his scalp without using rubber gloves?
If you read his book, “Breaking the Surface,” you will forgive Greg Louganis for his decision at that time. Magic Johnson’s revelation did not come until 1991.
And still, after Greg’s admission, the U.S. Olympic Committee has announced that they will not require athletes to declare their HIV status. Greg acted with honor in the face of a situation that no one had ever even imagined before.
If you read his book, you will also forgive him what looks like an insincere marketing ploy.
Breaking the news of his fatal illness by using Barbara Walters, the wide-ranging promos of ABC News and the cover of People magazine to coincide with the publication of his autobiography is a brilliant marketing strategy.
But Greg Louganis sick with AIDS is a tragedy, not an opportunity.
We are fascinated by Olympic champions and we jump at the chance to learn their secrets. In the case of Louganis, the secrets are staggering. And the athlete is much more than an Olympic champion - he is the greatest poet ever to soar off a diving board.
I had the privilege of sitting poolside at three of Greg’s Olympic performances. He was one of the special athletes who transform sport into art.
He gave the illusion of floating, slowly and gently, while all the others plummeted and crashed through the surface.
We are talking about the god of his sport. As a matter of fact, his diving competitors called him God Louganis. Over a 12-year span, an unfathomably long period of time for any athlete to hold a peak, Louganis made four Olympic teams.
From his silver medal as a lithe, graceful 16-year old in Montreal in 1976 to his double-gold dramatics in Seoul, Greg Louganis emerged and matured into a genius of fluid acrobatics and silent plunges.
With his co-author, Eric Marcus, Greg reveals many of the eccentricities of his sport as well as his own athletic idiosyncrasies. You learn that a body hurtles into the diving well off the 10-meter platform at a dangerous 32 miles per hour.
You are surprised that Greg smoked from the age of 9 all the way through his Olympic days. You hear that many of the world-class divers, men and women, battle eating disorders, turning to laxatives and syrup of Ipecac (the potion that led to Karen Carpenter’s death) to keep their body fat low. You may be moved to tears, as I was, in following the genesis of his inspirational friendship with his coach, Ron O’Brien.
But “Breaking the Surface” is much less the diary of an Olympic career than it is the gut-wrenching expose of an innocent, sensitive boy who has wound up today, at the age of 35, tragically unsure that he will reach his next birthday.
Elements of his story are far from Olympian - elements that millions of Americans will identify as similar to their own everyday struggles.
Greg’s deep-seated childhood feelings of being unwanted and unloved have evidently stuck with him his whole life - first spurred by learning he was adopted and then by his abusive father who called him “faggot” and “sissy” because he liked gymnastics instead of football and then by his schoolmates who beat him up after school, calling him “nigger,” referring to his Samoan heritage.
His candor in depicting the low self-esteem he acted out in the most significant relationship in his life so far is razor-sharp.
xxxx