Greg Louganis

Gregory Efthimios Louganis (born January 29, 1960) is an American Olympic diver who won gold medals at the 1984 and 1988 Summer Olympics on the springboard and platform.

He is the only man and the second diver in Olympic history to sweep the diving events in consecutive Olympic Games.

He has been called both "the greatest American diver" and "probably the greatest diver in history".

Louganis was born in El Cajon, California, and is of Samoan and Swedish descent.

His teenage biological parents placed him for adoption when he was eight months old and he was raised in California by his adoptive parents, Frances and Peter Louganis.

His adoptive father was of Greek descent.

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.

In 1978, he subsequently attended the University of Miami, where he majored in drama and continued diving.

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.

In 1981, he transferred to the University of California, Irvine, where he graduated with a major in theater and a minor in dance in 1983.

As a Junior Olympic competitor, Louganis caught the eye of Dr. Sammy Lee, two-time Olympic champion, who began coaching him.

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.

Louganis reconnected with his biological father, Fouvale Lutu, in 1984.

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.

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.

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.

John Ward, chief of HIV-AIDS surveillance at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, noted that the incident posed no risk to others because any blood was highly diluted by the pool water and "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.

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.

Through the help of DNA tests and his half-siblings, he found his biological mother in 2017.

He started taking dance, acrobatics and gymnastics classes at 18 months, after witnessing his sister's classes and attempting to join in.

By the age of three, he was practicing daily and was competing and giving public performances.

For the next few years, he regularly competed and performed at various places including nursing homes and the local naval base.

As a child, he was diagnosed with asthma and allergies, so to help with the conditions, he was encouraged to continue the dance and gymnastics classes.

He also took up trampolining, and at the age of nine began diving lessons after the family got a swimming pool.

He attended Santa Ana High School in Santa Ana, Valhalla High School in El Cajon, and Mission Viejo High School in Mission Viejo.