Pat McCormick, the primary diver to comb the gold medals in two Olympics, died on Tuesday at an assisted dwelling facility in Santa Ana, Calif. She was 92.
Her daughter, Kelly Robertson, confirmed her demise. She mentioned her mom had plenty of illnesses, together with well being issues and dementia.
On the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki, Finland, McCormick received the ladies’s 3-meter springboard and 10-meter platform competitions, the one ones being held for girls on the time. In 1956 in Melbourne, Australia, eight months after the start of her first youngster — and along with her husband, Glenn McCormick, because the workforce’s coach — she received them each once more.
Her feat was unequaled till one other American, Greg Louganis, captured the 3-meter and 10-meter titles on the 1988 Seoul Olympics 4 years after doing it in Los Angeles.
McCormick may need had the possibility to perform that feat thrice: She had handed up her Wilson Excessive College commencement in 1948 to compete in america Olympic trials, however she missed making the workforce by lower than a hundredth of a degree.
“Due to that failure,” she instructed The Los Angeles Instances in 1987, “I began dreaming in regards to the subsequent Olympics. In ’48, I simply needed to make the workforce. I used to be standing there crying after I got here up brief, and that’s once I determined I might win a gold medal within the subsequent Olympics. Then I assumed, ‘Why not go to two Olympics and win 4 gold medals?’”
McCormick selected to finish her profession after the 1956 Olympics, having received greater than two dozen nationwide championships and two Pan American Video games gold medals. She completed on a excessive observe: That yr she turned the primary feminine diver to win the James E. Sullivan Award as America’s excellent novice athlete, and solely the second girl. (The swimmer Ann Curtis had been the primary, in 1944.)
In 1965, McCormick was within the first group of inductees within the Worldwide Swimming Corridor of Fame. She was later named to the Worldwide Girls’s Sports activities Corridor of Fame and the U.S. Olympic Corridor of Fame.
In 1985, in an interview with Jim Murray of The Los Angeles Instances — who known as her “one of many larger-than-life stars of Olympic historical past,” on a par with Jesse Owens and Jim Thorpe — McCormick mirrored on her profession and appeared again on what she known as her “post-Olympic blahs”:
“Contemplate that some athletes have by no means had a dialog of their lives that didn’t need to do with swimming or diving or working or leaping. They’re solely of their muscle groups, their occasions, their scores. Plenty of folks can let you know how excessive to leap, how briskly to run, how deep to dive. However no person tells you that you need to match into that bigger world, a world you just about ignored or took to be unimportant.
“You lose your identification. You don’t have any instruments. The pitfall is that the athlete will get so absorbed in his personal world, his personal occasion, that every little thing exterior it appears trivial. To turn into the very best on the earth at what you do requires the form of tunnel imaginative and prescient of a stalking beast.”
McCormick tried to keep away from that lure. Missing the time to be a full-time faculty scholar, she took courses for 13 years and ultimately earned a level at Lengthy Seaside State School (now California State College, Lengthy Seaside).
Patricia Joan Keller was born in Seal Seaside, Calif., on Could 12, 1930. She started diving at a younger age however didn’t start formal diving coaching till she was 17 and was invited to work out on the Los Angeles Athletic Membership with Sammy Lee and Vicki Draves, each future Olympic medalists. She traveled there by trolley, paying the fare with cash her mom had made giving tea-leaf readings. She ultimately did 100 dives a day, six days every week, 12 months a yr.
In 1951 she turned the primary diver to win all 5 nationwide championships. However that very same yr, she realized that diving had some severe hazards: A physician inspecting her discovered quite a few lacerations, welts and scars, in addition to a loosened jaw and chipped enamel. “I’ve seen worse casualty circumstances,” he mentioned, “however solely when a constructing caved in.”
In 1949 she married Glenn McCormick, a pilot for United Airways who coached divers on his days off. They divorced in 1974, however there had been pressure of their marriage lengthy earlier than that: She as soon as mentioned that profitable her fourth gold medal “was an indication that I may proceed with my life,” however that “teaching turned Glenn’s entire life, his mistress, his every little thing, and I used to be simply one other individual.” Glenn McCormick died in 1995.
After McCormick retired as a diver, she acquired film gives however rejected them, though she did do some modeling for a swimsuit firm. She centered her power on working a diving camp, the place one in every of her prize college students was her daughter, Kelly, who would win a silver medal on springboard on the 1984 Olympics and a bronze in the identical occasion in 1988. She additionally turned a motivational speaker, and her Pat McCormick Academic Basis steered at-risk youths towards highschool commencement and a school training.
Along with her daughter, McCormick is survived by a son, Tim; six grandchildren; and a number of other great-grandchildren.
In her years as a speaker, McCormick preached that athletes wanted to take duty for his or her lives. “Once you step up on that victory stand,” she mentioned in 1985, “you’re going to be abandoned. All of the assist techniques you had are going after their subsequent undertaking. They will’t let you know tips on how to deal with success; they’ll solely let you know tips on how to obtain it.
”The trick is to remain on that victory stand. By no means step down from it.”
Frank Litsky, a longtime sportswriter for The Instances, died in 2018. Peter Keepnews and Alex Traub contributed reporting.
Supply: NY Times
