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August 18, 2004 12:03 pm

Wilkinson back in chase for diving gold

By VICKI MICHAELIS

USA TODAY

ATHENS, Greece -- Laura Wilkinson was 22 years old when she climbed to the 10-meter platform in the Sydney Games, pulled a blue kayak shoe off her broken right foot, dropped it to the pool deck, then dove into Olympic history.

Going in, she figured this was one dive in a string of many, many more. Coming out, she wasn't so sure.

Wilkinson won a surprise gold medal that day, rising from fifth to first, anonymity to celebrity. She and longtime coach Ken Armstrong were among the very few who didn't consider her victory, by just 1.74 points over a field of heavily favored Chinese and Canadians, an upset.

The surprise for Wilkinson was her mind-set afterward.

"Before the Olympics,'' she says, "I had always known I was going to keep diving, because I was still really young and I kind of thought, `Well, why wouldn't I keep diving?' After I won, I had this opposite spin, like, `Can I do that again? Do I keep diving? What do I have to live up to?' ``After a year away, she found out the only expectations she had to meet were her own. She finished fifth in the 2001 nationals. She braced for mutterings that she was a has-been, for hushed suggestions that she call it a career. She got the opposite.

"Everybody was so awesome, saying, `You did great. It's so great to see you back,' `` Wilkinson says. "I knew that people were going to like me the same whether I was first or last. That was a big step for me in my comeback.''

Despite having to keep up with Chinese innovation by increasing the degree of difficulty on all her optional dives, something Armstrong likens to "going from the high jump to the pole vault,'' Wilkinson is back in the Olympics. She is the best hope for a U.S. team that counts her Sydney gold as its only medal in the last two Games.

The preliminary round is Friday; the final is Sunday. "This is just a whole new journey. I hope it works out the same way. But it almost feels like the first time all over again,'' Wilkinson says.

She was hobbled when she traveled this path in Sydney, the result of a dry-land training incident in March 2000. She broke her foot in three places while using a piece of plywood equipment and didn't have time for surgery before the Games.

After Sydney, she did the gold medalist circuit, giving speeches and appearing on shows such as "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?" and "Hollywood Squares." She had foot surgery in November 2000, finished her bachelor's degree in public relations at the University of Texas and cultivated a relationship with swimming coach-turned-pharmaceutical salesman Eriek Hulseman, whom she married in 2002.

She dabbled in diving again in the summer of 2001, competing in nationals and the Goodwill Games, where she finished seventh. But she didn't start full-time training until January 2002. Even then, Armstrong says, it took about six months for her to return to her routine full speed.

Learning the exponentially more difficult dives was daunting, but "that wasn't the issue,'' he says. "The issue was whether she had the level of intensity to be competitive again. I felt it as a coach what she went through is draining. You don't want to do this just because you don't know what else to do, and that's what I was seeing in her practices.''

In the last seven months, the diving world has seen Wilkinson do what earned her gold in Sydney - tap into unwavering mental mettle under stacked-odds conditions.

In the Olympic trials, Wilkinson blew the 42-point lead she carried into the finals but nailed her final dive to win the competition and her spot in Athens.

In February, she won a World Cup against many of the same divers she'll see this weekend. She was eighth after the preliminary round, seventh after the semifinals and won by nearly 20 points. A back three-and-a-half-somersault tuck with a 3.3 degree of difficulty, which she says was the hardest new dive she's learned, helped her take control of the competition.

"That was huge,'' she says of the World Cup win. "Just to know that I still had what it takes and I could stand up with everybody and do my dives. I even missed one dive pretty bad there. So that was really a good feeling, knowing I could improve on so many things coming into Athens.''

The result in the World Cup, Wilkinson's first competition since Sydney against the world's top divers, instilled in her a belief that she could go from platform to medal podium again in Athens, Armstrong says.

Wilkinson keeps her 2000 gold medal at her home in The Woodlands, Texas. She brings it out whenever people ask.

"People get such a hoot out of touching it,'' she says. "It's like a little Aladdin's lamp. They love to rub it. They think magic is going to happen if they touch it.''

Wilkinson will carry a question to the edge of the platform this weekend: Can it happen again?

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