Greg Louganis

At 64 years old, Greg Louganis has this physical status:

As a Junior Olympic competitor, Louganis caught the eye of Dr. Sammy Lee, two-time Olympic champion, who began coaching him. At sixteen, Louganis took part in the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, where he placed second in the tower event, behind Italian sport legend Klaus Dibiasi. Two years later, with Dibiasi retired, Louganis won his first world title in the same event with the help of coach Ron O'Brien.

Louganis was a favorite for two golds in the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, but an American boycott of the games prevented him from participating. He was one of 461 athletes to receive a Congressional Gold Medal years later. Louganis won two titles at the world championships in 1982, where he became the first diver in a major international meeting to get a perfect score of 10 from all seven judges. At the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, with record scores and leads over his opponents, Louganis won gold medals in both the springboard and tower diving events.

He won two more world championship titles in 1986.

At the 1988 Seoul Olympics, he struck his head on the springboard during the preliminary rounds, leading to a concussion. He completed the preliminaries despite his injury. He then earned the highest single score of the qualifying round for his next dive and repeated the dive during the finals, earning the gold medal by a margin of 25 points. In the 10 m finals, he won the gold medal, performing a 3.4 difficulty dive in his last attempt, earning 86.70 points for a total of 638.61, surpassing silver medalist Xiong Ni by only 1.14 points. His comeback earned him the title of ABC's Wide World of Sports "Athlete of the Year" for 1988.

Six months before the 1988 Seoul Olympics, Louganis was diagnosed with HIV, and started antiretrovirals. After Louganis came out publicly as HIV-positive in 1995, people in and out of the international diving community began to question Louganis's decision not to disclose his HIV status at the time of his head injury during the 1988 Olympics, given that he had bled into a pool that others then dove into. Louganis has stated that, during the ordeal, he was "paralyzed with fear" that he would infect another competitor, or the doctor who treated him. Ultimately, no one else was infected. The incident posed no risk to others as any blood was fully diluted by the pool water, and according to John Ward, chief of HIV-AIDS surveillance at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, "chlorine kills HIV". Since skin is an effective barrier to HIV, the only way the virus could enter would be through an open wound; "If the virus just touches the skin, it is unheard of for it to cause infection: the skin has no receptors to bind HIV," explained the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases' Dr. Anthony Fauci at the time.

Louganis got few endorsement deals following his 1984 and 1988 Olympic victories, his one major deal being Speedo, a partnership which lasted until 2007. Some of his fellow athletes blamed homophobia for his lack of deals, since he had been rumored to be gay even before he came out. Louganis has stated that he suspects that his sexuality played a part, although he feels that in part he was simply overshadowed in the public imagination by other American Olympians, most notably Mary Lou Retton.

In 2016, Louganis was pictured on boxes of Wheaties cereal, where prominent American athletes are famously featured, as part of a special "Legends" series that also included 1980s Olympians Janet Evans and Edwin Moses. This occurred approximately a year after a change.org petition was launched that requested that he be featured, although General Mills denied any influence from the petition.

In November 2010, Louganis began coaching divers of a wide range of ages and abilities in the SoCal Divers Club in Fullerton, California.

He was a mentor to the US diving team at the London 2012 Olympics and the Rio de Janeiro 2016 Olympics.

Media career

Louganis had been a theatre major in college, and in the late 1980s and 1990s, he appeared in a number of movies, including Touch Me in 1997.

In 1993, he played the role of Darius in an Off-Broadway production of the play Jeffrey. In 1995, he starred for six weeks in the Off-Broadway production of Dan Butler's one man-show about gay life, The Only Thing Worse You Could Have Told Me, taking over from Butler himself. In the play he portrayed 14 different characters.

In 2008, he appeared in the film Watercolors, in the role of Coach Brown, a swimming instructor in a high school.

In 2012, he appeared in the ninth episode of the second season of IFC's comedy series Portlandia, playing himself.

In September 2000, Louganis appeared on Hollywood Squares as a member of famous Olympic gold medalists "Dream Team," competing in a special week of the game show series broadcast as a tribute to the 2000 Summer Games. The episodes marked the first time that all these champions came together for this kind of television competition.

In 2013, Louganis was Dive Master in the celebrity diving show Splash on ABC, and a diving judge on Celebrity Splash! on Channel 7 in Australia.

In 2020, he was a diving judge on the second season of the ABC show Holey Moley.

In 1996, Louganis recounted his story in a best-selling autobiography, Breaking the Surface, co-written with Eric Marcus. In the book, Louganis detailed a relationship of domestic abuse and rape as well as teenage depression, and how he began smoking and drinking at a young age. The book spent five weeks at number one on The New York Times Best Seller list.

In 1998, Louganis released a video diary called Looking to the Light, which picked up where Breaking the Surface left off.

In 1999, Louganis co-wrote the book For the Life of Your Dog: A Complete Guide to Having a Dog From Adoption and Birth Through Sickness and Health with Betty Sicora Siino.

Source

• In 1984, Louganis received the James E. Sullivan Award from the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) as the most outstanding amateur athlete in the United States.
• In 1988, he was awarded "Athlete of the Year" by ABC's Wide World of Sports.
• In 1989, he was nominated for "Best Male Athlete" by the Kids' Choice Awards.
• In June 2013, Louganis was inducted into the California Sports Hall of Fame. He was among the first class of inductees into the National Gay and Lesbian Sports Hall of Fame on August 2, 2013.
• In April 2015, Louganis was presented the Bonham Centre Award from The Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, University of Toronto, for his contributions to the advancement and education of issues around sexual identification.
• In July 2015, he was a torch bearer for the 2015 Special Olympics World Summer Games in Los Angeles.
• In January 2017, he was a Grand Marshal of the Rose Parade in Pasadena, California.