THERE is a picture which tells it all Fu Mingxia, frozen in mid air against a cloudless blue wall and dipping towards a skyline bearing the nubbled spires of Gaudi's Sagrada Familia. Barcelona 1992. Diving. Icon.
She is back today, 18 years old now, but not yet deprived of the lithe grace which made her one of the stars of Barcelona.
Fu Mingxia got a headstart on the world. She was taught to dive before she could swim. Blessed with the supple bones and easy grace of the natural athlete, the Chinese sought first to make her into a gymnast. By the time she was eight, they had given up on her, deeming her too old to ever develop into a world class competitor.
So she took to diving, practising while she learned to swim by tying a rope around her waist and having coaches pull her out of the water. Aged nine, she was moved from her home in Hubei province to Beijing some 600 miles away where she lived and trained at a national diving school. Aged 11 she won a gold medal in the 10 metre platform event at the 1990 Goodwill Games in Seattle, following up the next year with a gold at the World Championships and then in 1992 just a few weeks short of her 14th birthday she won a gold medal at the Olympic Games in Barcelona.
She stands at just under five feet, weighing about 92lb and say she has never been afraid of leaping and tumbling from her concrete perch above the pool. Last week, in the preliminary stages of the platform diving competition, her head came so close to impact as she spun poolwards that her short hair actually clipped the platform edge. She entered the water perfectly and left the pool with the same contentedly tranquil expression that has become her trademark.
The image of her hurling herself into the sky on Montjuic high above Barcelona bespeaks glamour. Life in Beijing is tinted differently. Fu Mingxia and her team mates train year round in an outdoor facility.
"If you can dive through a rainstorm," she says "competition is never too hard."
She has revolutionised her sport becoming the first woman to perform backward and inward three and a half somersaults and setting new standards of difficulty for divers at the Barcelona Games.
Last Autumn she came to Atlanta for the World Diving Championships and surprised some by extending the range of her activities to the three metre springboard competition as well. She won that event and finished second on the platform.
On Saturday, she went one better, winning her second successive platform gold comfortably and today, in the three metre preliminaries, she begins her quest for a double which hasn't been completed since 1960.
Mingxia's ambition is to head to Sydney in the year 2000, needing to win two golds there to become the first person ever to win five diving golds.
There are six types of dives competitors can choose from in competition, each with varying degrees of difficulty: forward, backward, reverse, inward, twisting and armstand. The reverse dive is performed facing frontward on the platform with a backward somersault rotating toward the platform. The inward dive is executed facing backwards (away from the pool) with a forward somersault towards the board. Twisting dives are performed by turning the body on a vertical axis. Armstands (platform only) begin with the diver in motionless handstand on the board.
Dives can be executed with one of four body positions: Straight (arms and legs extended fully), pike (bent at the waist), tuck (curled position), free (combination of two positions with a twist).
There is no room for last minute improvisation. Divers must give written details before hand of each dive and the exact order they will be performing them in.
