Watching an intimidating 33-foot drop, adrenaline pumping, Wilkinson flipped gracefully into the water under. The challenges she has overcome all through her diving profession have made her robust — robust sufficient to dominate the game for a decade.
She is the primary girl to win diving’s three main world titles, together with a gold medal at her first Olympic Video games in 2000. Wilkinson advised CNN she is hungry for extra. After 9 years in retirement, and restoration from a harmful damage, the now 42-year-old is trying a comeback within the face of a worldwide pandemic.
When Wilkinson resumed coaching to compete on the Video games in Tokyo, which had been initially scheduled for July 2020, she felt a nagging and unfamiliar weak spot in one in every of her arms.
An MRI revealed main harm to the discs in her neck, triggered largely by a profession of repeatedly hitting the water at excessive speeds. Her physician warned {that a} automobile accident or unhealthy fall might depart her a quadriplegic.
Now married with 4 kids, Wilkinson was advised she would wish spinal surgical procedure not simply to dive, however to securely do on a regular basis actions along with her kids. Wilkinson had the surgical procedure and rushed to get again into the water forward of the 2020 Olympic trials.
For athletes who practice their total athletic careers to peak on the proper time, few would possibly welcome the postponement of the 2020 Olympic Video games — however Wilkinson calls it a present of time to get well and practice.
Her comeback hinges on her capability to beat damage, one thing Wilkinson has carried out earlier than. Adaptation, her profession has demonstrated, is one in every of her best strengths.
Nicknamed the ‘angel of demise’ in competitors
Wilkinson started dreaming concerning the Olympics when she noticed gymast Mary Lou Retton’s perfect-10 vaults on the 1984 Olympic Video games.
When she was 15 she stop gymnastics and visited the diving properly for the primary time. Wilkinson embraced the unfamiliar territory, dreaming that this sport might sooner or later lead her to the Olympics.
In 1999 she gave up her faculty scholarship on the College of Texas to coach full-time for the Olympics. However three months earlier than the 2000 Olympic trials, she broke a number of bones in her proper foot in a routine diving drill.
By means of a fog of anger, ache and heartbreak, Wilkinson stated it was the prospect of an unfulfilled dream that pushed her to maintain coaching and competing with out trying again.
“I keep in mind the burden of it hitting me and simply realizing this has been my dream since I used to be slightly lady. This is perhaps my solely shot. I’ve bought to discover a means — if it is on one foot — to get to these trials and simply strive as a result of I do not need to look again in 5 years and ask ‘what if,'” Wilkinson stated.
Wilkinson’s foot was not totally healed when she competed in Sydney, however she persevered, climbing the steps to the diving platform on the Olympics carrying a protecting shoe to keep away from the ache of strolling barefoot. She was the one American to succeed in the finals of the ladies’s 10-meter platform, beginning off in eighth place.
It had been 36 years since an American girl had gained gold, and it disrupted China’s 12-year successful streak within the occasion.
“She’s one of the tenacious opponents I’ve ever seen in my life,” Wilkinson’s lifelong coach, Kenny Armstrong, advised CNN. He added, “Any individual nicknamed her the ‘angel of demise,’ as a result of she was genuinely good and destroyed you after which advised you the way good you probably did.”
Whereas her foot was in a forged, Wilkinson and Armstrong needed to suppose exterior the field for her coaching. Unable to get into the water till three weeks earlier than the trials, they practiced visualization strategies and studied a copious quantity of movie to arrange.
“In some methods that may be a greater feat to me than being Olympic champion. … Getting on that staff was such an enormous feat after what we went by way of,” she stated. “I believe I may need made the Olympic staff if I hadn’t have damaged my foot, however I do know I’d not have been on high of the rostrum.”
Over the subsequent decade Wilkinson competed in two extra Olympic Video games and have become the primary girl in historical past to earn all three world titles for platform diving, successful the 2000 Olympics, 2004 World Cup, and 2005 World Championships.
An ‘unbeatable’ power in girls’s diving
Wilkinson did not place within the subsequent two Olympics, however she had modified the game by upping the diploma of problem, Armstrong stated.
Wilkinson’s gold medal-winning dive in 2000 consisted of two and a half somersaults and a half twist. By 2008, Wilkinson added two extra twists to that dive, by some means managing to pack much more talent into the seconds she has between leaving the platform and hitting the water at speeds nearing 35 miles an hour.
Two dives on the record that Wilkinson executed required three and half rotations in a pike place, or a reverse tuck — one thing USA Diving Coach Matt Scoggin stated no girl was doing shortly after the Sydney Olympics.
Wilkinson made the world work towards her objectives, Scoggin advised CNN. The bar she set whereas competing was, and is, the usual to beat, he stated.
A mindset unfettered by adversity, on high of a willingness to at all times practice more durable, is why Scoggin places Wilkinson in a class of her personal. With these components, when requested to explain Wilkinson in a phrase, Scoggin selected “unbeatable.”
Retirement could not preserve Wilkinson from the pool
After her third Olympics, at age 30, she determined to retire from diving to construct her household. Wilkinson and her husband, Eriek Hulseman, have 4 kids, two of whom are adopted from China and Ethiopia. She stated returning to the pool was at all times at the back of her thoughts.
“There’s this ‘mother guilt’ and this thought that you need to put away all of your goals and all of your ambitions as a result of now it is time in your children, when in actuality I’ve discovered that your children could make you higher, they make you stronger and (you may) take them with you on the journey,” Wilkinson stated.
In 2016, Armstrong casually invited Wilkinson again to the pool to work out. She stated it felt like coming residence.
Whereas Wilkinson was retired she did not see the game progress in problem, one of many causes she requested Armstrong whether or not it could be loopy to make an Olympic comeback. He stated no.
Inside a 12 months, she had remastered her total record of 10-meter dives.
Wilkinson stated her kids at the moment are her motivation to return to the winners’ podium. She hopes to be a optimistic instance for them of setting and reaching your objectives.
Popping out of retirement revealed a doubtlessly catastrophic damage
Months after starting her comeback, Wilkinson was struggling to maintain one in every of her arms straight when she hit the water after diving from the 10-meter platform. The weak spot was regarding as a result of Wilkinson was struggling to execute her entries regardless of feeling bodily robust and wholesome.
She was recognized with degenerative disc illness and had disc protrusion in a number of cervical joints. This created a harmful instability of the discs in her neck.
She stated the prognosis was terrifying. Wilkinson’s neurosurgeon advised her that with out surgical procedure, an accident might trigger quadriplegia.
Wilkinson went forward with the spinal fusion surgical procedure, and fewer than 4 months later, she was again on the diving properly training.
Now that the Video games have been pushed again a 12 months, Wilkinson stated she plans to make use of this further time to her benefit, taking each alternative to develop stronger, bodily and mentally. She has set her sights on successful in Tokyo.
No American girl has positioned on the Olympics in girls’s 10-meter diving since she broke China’s successful streak in 2000. Though she has already made historical past, Wilkinson is raring to do it once more.
“You do not have to have the lead you probably have the guts to come back from behind,” Wilkinson recited as one in every of her favourite quotes, a mantra that has repeatedly served as inspiration when she faces setbacks.
“I will not be the quickest, strongest, or get within the water cleanest, however I’ve extra coronary heart than anybody right here,” Wilkinson added.
Coronary heart — a measure that can’t be quantified in sports activities, however exemplified in the way in which an athlete wins, loses and overcomes — is the inspiration of Wilkinson’s story.
CNN’s Nicole Chavez contributed to this report.
