When Greg Louganis looks at the Marguerite Aquatic Center’s diving tower, he said, he is filled with both joy and terror.
The joy comes from knowing that training on that platform helped him become the most decorated diver in the history of the sport.
The terror comes from remembering the feeling he had when he was learning a new dive. “It was like jumping off a cliff, not knowing what was going to be underneath.”
Louganis was a charter member of the Nadadores Diving Team in 1978. Now 56, he returned to the aquatics complex on Saturday to make the final dive off that iconic platform.
Louganis grew up in the San Diego area. Inspired by watching his big sister in dance classes, he started taking acrobatics as an 18-month-old kid.
At age 3, Louganis was competing and winning dance and gymnastics competitions. He had dreams of being an Olympic gymnast, but at 12, doctors told him his knees had taken too much pounding for him to continue in that sport.
So Louganis, who had also been taking diving lessons since he was 9, concentrated his efforts on the board. His skills as a gymnast translated well, and he was soon performing difficult dives.
“Up to a certain age you’re pretty fearless,” he said. “But as you get older and wiser you’re standing on that board and saying, ‘Oh my God. I could get hurt.’”
In 1976, Louganis moved to Orange County and began training for the Olympics with legendary coach Sammy Lee. He practiced at Santa Ana College, Los Coyotes Country Club in Buena Park and at Belmont Plaza in Long Beach.
Louganis won a silver medal in the 1976 Olympics in Montreal.
After the Olympics, he took on three part-time jobs in Orange County so he could train at the newly opened state-of-the-art Marguerite Aquatic Center in Mission Viejo. Louganis became one of the charter members of the Nadadores Diving Team.
His diving platform came from the Los Coyotes Country Club, where Louganis had been training.
The other divers teased me, he recalled: “Wow, he really is spoiled. He brought his own diving platform.”
After the boycott of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, Louganis took the skills he learned on that Nadadores tower and won gold in the Olympics in Los Angeles in 1984 and Seoul, South Korea, in 1988.
A defining moment in Louganis’ career was the concussion he suffered when his head hit the board during the Seoul Olympics. Less than 30 minutes after stitching up a large gash, Louganis won a gold medal.
Louganis offered this advice to the current athletes diving off the Aquatic Center tower: “I would encourage all kids to be better than me. I’d love to see all my records broken.”
