XXIV Olympiad Seoul 1988 on obverse in field; reverse uninscribed. Edge lettering of DIVING / MEN / PLATFORM.
Together with multicolored ribbon and original blue box of issue inscribed GAMES OF THE XXIVTH OLYMPIAD SEOUL 1988.
With satin finish.
Diameter 60mm.

THE LAST GOLD MEDAL WON BY GREG LOUGANIS.

In 1988 Louganis made his third and final appearance as an Olympic competitor at the Seoul Summer Games. It had been a fairly easy journey back to the games, and once again Louganis was heavily favored to take the gold in both springboard and platform diving. The preliminaries started off strong for Louganis. After eight dives, he was leading comfortably. Then, on the ninth dive, Louganis attempted a reverse two-and-a-half pike, usually one of his best dives. As Louganis took off from the board, his coach Ron O'Brien had a sick feeling that something was wrong, though he wasn't quite sure what. In an instant Greg's head smacked against the board, tearing open his scalp. He landed awkwardly in the pool, dazed and embarrassed. He swam to the side of the pool and scrambled out, holding his head and waving all but O'Brien away. As the crowd absorbed the shock of what they'd just seen, the two men retreated to the pool waiting room with the team doctor.

At that moment, Louganis broke down in tears. It wasn't just his injury which required 4 stitches and left him with a concussion; it was also the knowledge that he was HIV+.

Greg's positive diagnosis had come just six months before the games. At the time, an HIV+ diagnosis meant certain death, and a global campaign of hatred and fear had raged against the positive community since the beginning of the decade. During the period leading up to the games, Greg came to terms with his status, woke up every four hours to take his meds, and still managed to train and compete at the top of his form. And now, this injury threatened to take it all away. As Greg wept in the waiting room, Ron said, "Greg, you have a wonderful career to look back on. You don't have to do this. You don't have to do anything. No matter what you decide, I'm behind you a hundred percent" (p 18).

Greg's first response was that his low scores on the dive must have put him out of contention, but that was not the case. He had more than enough points to make the top twelve and compete the next day for the gold, as long as he finished his program. The question was, did he have the emotional stamina to complete two more dives? It wasn't over—if Greg could find the strength to compete.

Once Greg knew he was still in the running, he never considered giving up. He thought about his friend Ryan White, the teenager who was a national spokesperson for the AIDS epidemic. He thought about his years of training. He thought about his mom. He told his coach, "We've worked too long and hard to get here. I'm not going to give up now" (p 19).

Greg had about 12 minutes before his next dive. The doctor stitched up his wound—without anesthesia—and put on a waterproof patch. Greg took a little walk before his next dive, jumped into an adjacent pool to get moving again, and headed back to the main stage. His final dives were two of the toughest in his repertoire, and both involved turning in the same direction as the dive that led to the head injury. As he climbed back up the board, Ron said, "Greg, you've done this a thousand times in practice. Just do it like you do it" (p 20).

Louganis walked to the end of the platform and tossed his chamois down onto the springboard. As he shook out his arms and legs, the crowd erupted in thunderous applause. Then the arena fell quiet. For a moment Louganis felt nerves—he was attempting another dive before he could figure out what he did wrong on the previous one—then, like the champion he is, he just did it. That dive received the highest score of any in the preliminaries. He nailed the next one as well and ended the preliminaries in third place. He still had a shot at gold.

Images of his injury were broadcast around the globe, and Greg was inundated with queries from the press. His workout the morning of the finals started badly, but his coach kept him focused and by the end he felt like he had his sea legs again. For the final round, Greg stayed focused on the diving, tuning out his injury, his anxiety, the competition, the press—everything that was conspiring to undermine his confidence. One upside to his injury? It put him in the position of underdog, a viewpoint he had not enjoyed in years. He performed solidly, if not spectacularly, and by the 7th round, opened up a twenty-point lead over the nearest competitor. But the ninth dive—the dive on which he injured himself—loomed. In the finals, divers perform the exact same series of dives they do in the prelims. Greg waivered. Would he make the same mistake? His coach whispered to him as he headed up the ladder: "Just do it like you always do it."

He landed the ninth dive with 8s and 9s, performed solidly on the 10th, and for the last dive, a reverse three-and-a-half tuck, he nailed it, leaving him with a score of 730.80 with two more divers to go. With his dives over, Louganis could relax; when he saw his biggest competitor hit the water a little back and a little short, he knew he had won the gold.

Greg's coach wanted him to relax after springboard and recuperate, but the next day Greg was back in the pool as planned, in spite of the stitches in his head and a bruised skull. It was important to Greg to stick to the schedule to meet the challenges of the competition, especially since he had not been on the platform for five days. In his memoir, he writes, "During those three days before the platform preliminaries began, Ron and I never talked about what was going to happen or not happen. In a sense, we were in denial and just focused on the job at hand in the way we always did. When you're under stress like that, you have to stay with your normal routine or the stress takes over and you start getting uptight"(p 288). In addition to his concussion and head wound, Greg was troubled by a sore shoulder, a bone chip in his wrist, and sinusitis.

The preliminaries were "totally routine," Louganis writes, and he got through them on autopilot, landing at the top of the field. The day of the finals, however, was different: "Normally, in a major competition, I would rise quickly to the top of the scoreboard and stay there. But this time, I moved between first and third throughout the whole ten rounds. The real struggle began in the seventh round, when fourteen-year-old Xiong Ni, from China, moved from fourth place to second, and I moved from third to first, leading by only eight points. In the eighth round, Ni took the lead by two points, and increased it to three points with his ninth dive" (p 289). Greg's coach kept him focused, telling him to "do what you do." He never focused on winning gold, just on doing the best.

The competition came down to the last two dives. Greg knew he was behind because he peeked at the scoreboard, something he normally never did. Louganis couldn't see Ni's final dive from where he stood, but he heard it rip through the water and saw his scores of 8.5s and 9s across the board. Nearly perfect. Greg's final dive was the reverse three-and-a-half that had killed Russian diver Sergei Shalibashvili in 1983. At a 3.4 degree of difficulty, it was the most difficult dive in the sport. It was slightly more difficult than Ni's final dive, which gave Louganis hope that he could pull out a win. But still he had to be perfect or nearly so to edge out Ni.

He writes, "This time I had to narrow my focus and shut everything out. I had to go into my own world: just the pool, the board, and me and Ron. I had to be intensely aware of my body and my timing to make sure that everything was in sync. I couldn't afford to be distracted by the audience. And I couldn't let myself think that this was the last dive of my career" (p 292).

Once he climbed the platform and announced his dive, he thought, "I knew at this point there was a better chance I'd come in second than first. I wasn't resigned to that possibility, but I considered it briefly. I thought to myself, What's the worst that can happen? I do a dive that's not so great and win a silver. I thought about some of the people I'd dived with in the past who would have loved to have won a silver medal ... In the twelve years since I'd won the silver in Montreal, my appreciation of that accomplishment had grown. I was proud of having won the silver, especially at such a young age. That helped make the prospect of winning the silver this time around okay. It would still be a hell of an accomplishment, and it was all right" (p 293).

Greg focused, planned the dive all the way through in his mind, raised his arms into a T, and counted off: one, two, three, go. The final dive of his career.

It wasn't a perfect dive, but it was pretty good. Greg's final score was 638.61, a mere 1.14 points ahead of Ni, but enough to win his fourth Olympic gold medal and fifth medal overall.