Greg Louganis: Diving and Jiving

In 1976, Greg Louganis proved he could twist and spin both on the ground and in the air. A member of Dick Clark's American Bandstand troupe, Louganis danced to the latest hits and that summer became a hit himself, substituting a platform diving board for a platform stage and soaring to an Olympic silver medal.

Since then Louganis has changed his colors from red, white and blue to the orange and green of the University of Miami, yet the sophomore still continues to excel at both diving and jiving.

On February 23, the sophomore performed in a modern dance concert which resulted in scholarship offers from several dance companies. Now, a month later, Louganis will attempt to justify his diving scholarship as the defending NCAA one-meter champion and a top contender on the three-meter board.

"Both dancing and diving are made up of aesthetics and rhythm," Louganis said recently. "When I dive I usually have a music in mind and my favorite time to work out is when we have the radio on and I sing songs to myself, and dive, and have good time."

Actually, Louganis's dancing career started long before he could pronounce "degree of difficulty," and he cites a photograph of him when he was two years old wearing tap shoes and holding a baton.

"My parents wanted to teach my sister and me coordination when we were young so while my sister took dance lessons I went and ran around the mats," the resident of El Cahone, Calif., said. "My mother got me diving lessons when I was nine because we had a pool in the backyard and she was afraid I'd kill myself on the board."

Only five years later, Louganis went to his first Nationals.

After not qualifying for the 1975 Pan American Games by one place, the 5-ft., 8-in., 160-pounder erased the word "almost" from his vocabulary by capturing both the three- and ten-meter boards at the 1976 Olympic trials.

"Winning the trials was a goal I had passed off as unattainable. I never thought I was good enough--it was just a dream and all of a sudden I was in Montreal," Louganis said.

But the reverie didn't end in Long Beach as Louganis recalls his march into the Olympic stadium: "We turned the corner into the stadium filled with fans cheering U-S-A. I was all eyes--my eyes were bugging out of my head--I had never seen anything like it before."

One of the youngest divers to ever compete at the Olympics, Louganis said he was "intimidated, but since I was younger I had less pressure