Gregory "
Greg"
Efthimios Louganis (born January 29, 1960) is an American Olympic
diverDiving is the sport of jumping or falling into water from a platform or springboard, sometimes while performing acrobatics. Diving is an internationally-recognized sport that is part of the Olympic Games. In addition, unstructured and non-competitive diving is a recreational pastime.Diving is one...
and author.
He received the
James E. Sullivan AwardThe James E. Sullivan Award, presented by the American Amateur Athletic Union , is awarded annually in April to "the outstanding amateur athlete in the United States". Often referred to as the Oscar of sports awards, it was first presented in 1930. The award is named for the AAU's founder and past...
from the
Amateur Athletic UnionThe Amateur Athletic Union is one of the largest non-profit volunteer sports organizations in the United States. A multi-sport organization, the AAU is dedicated exclusively to the promotion and development of amateur sports and physical fitness programs.-History:The AAU was founded in 1888 to...
(AAU) in 1984 as the most outstanding amateur athlete in the United States.
Early life
Louganis is of
SamoaSamoa , officially the Independent State of Samoa, formerly known as Western Samoa is a country encompassing the western part of the Samoan Islands in the South Pacific Ocean. It became independent from New Zealand in 1962. The two main islands of Samoa are Upolu and one of the biggest islands in...
n/
SwedishSweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....
descent. He was raised in California by his
adoptive parentsAdoption is a process whereby a person assumes the parenting for another and, in so doing, permanently transfers all rights and responsibilities from the original parent or parents...
, a
Greek-AmericanGreek Americans are Americans of Greek descent also described as Hellenic descent. According to the 2007 U.S. Census Bureau estimation, there were 1,380,088 people of Greek ancestry in the United States, while the State Department mentions that around 3,000,000 Americans claim to be of Greek descent...
couple. He attended Santa Ana High School and
Valhalla High SchoolValhalla High School is a public, comprehensive high school located in Rancho San Diego, a neighborhood near El Cajon, California. It serves approximately 1,700 students in grades nine through twelve. Opened in 1974, Valhalla is the tenth of 12 high schools established by the Grossmont Union High...
in El Cajon, California.
Diving career
At sixteen Louganis took part in the
1976 Summer OlympicsThe 1976 Summer Olympics, officially known as the Games of the XXI Olympiad, was an international multi-sport event celebrated in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, in 1976. Montreal was awarded the rights to the 1976 Games on May 12, 1970, at the 69th IOC Session in Amsterdam, over the bids of Moscow and...
in
MontrealMontreal is a city in Canada. It is the largest city in the province of Quebec, the second-largest city in Canada and the seventh largest in North America...
, where he placed second in the tower event, behind
ItalianItaly , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
sport legend
Klaus DibiasiKlaus Dibiasi is a former diver from Italy, who competed in four consecutive Summer Olympics for his native country, starting in 1964...
. Two years later, with Dibiasi retired, Louganis won his first world title in the same event. In 1978, he accepted a diving scholarship to the
University of MiamiThe University of Miami is a private, non-sectarian university founded in 1925 with its main campus in Coral Gables, Florida, a medical campus in Miami city proper at Civic Center, and an oceanographic research facility on Virginia Key., the university currently enrolls 15,629 students in 12...
where he studied theater, but in 1981 transferred to the
University of California, IrvineThe University of California, Irvine , founded in 1965, is one of the ten campuses of the University of California, located in Irvine, California, USA...
, where he graduated with a
Bachelor of ArtsA Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences, or both...
.
Louganis was a favorite for two golds in the
1980 Summer OlympicsThe 1980 Summer Olympics, officially known as the Games of the XXII Olympiad, was an international multi-sport event celebrated in Moscow in the Soviet Union. In addition, the yachting events were held in Tallinn, and some of the preliminary matches and the quarter-finals of the football tournament...
in Moscow, but an American boycott of the games prevented him from participating. Louganis won two world diving titles in 1982. In the
1984 Los Angeles OlympicsThe 1984 Summer Olympics, officially known as the Games of the XXIII Olympiad, was an international multi-sport event held in Los Angeles, California, United States in 1984...
, with record scores and leads over his opponents, Louganis won gold medals in both the springboard and tower diving events.
After winning two more world championship titles in 1986, he repeated his 1984 feat in the
1988 Seoul OlympicsThe 1988 Summer Olympics, officially known as the Games of the XXIV Olympiad, were an all international multi-sport events celebrated from September 17 to October 2, 1988 in Seoul, South Korea. They were the second summer Olympic Games to be held in Asia and the first since the 1964 Summer Olympics...
, although not without difficulties: he suffered a concussion after hitting his head on the springboard during the preliminary rounds while performing a reverse 2½ pike. He completed the preliminaries despite his injury, and went on to repeat a similar dive during the finals, earning the gold medal. In the 10m finals he won the gold medal performing a 3.4 difficulty dive in his last attempt, earning in total 638.61 points, surpassing silver medalist Xiong Ni by only 1.14 points. His comeback earned him the title of
ABCThe American Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network. Created in 1943 from the former NBC Blue radio network, ABC is owned by The Walt Disney Company and is part of Disney-ABC Television Group. Its first broadcast on television was in 1948...
's
Wide World of Sports "Athlete of the Year" for 1988.
Personal life
Greg Louganis is openly gay. After he tested positive for HIV in 1988, he recounted his story in a best-selling book
Breaking the SurfaceBreaking the Surface is a best-selling book by Greg Louganis, co-written with Eric Marcus published in 1996. The book spent five weeks at number one on the New York Times Best Seller list....
co-written with
Eric MarcusEric Marcus is an American non-fiction writer. His works are primarily of LGBT interest, including Breaking the Surface, the autobiography of gay Olympic diving champion Greg Louganis, which became a #1 New York Times Bestseller and Making History: The Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Equal Rights,...
. The book spent five weeks at number one on the
New York Times Best Seller listThe New York Times Best Seller list is widely considered the preeminent list of best-selling books in the United States. It is published weekly in The New York Times Book Review magazine, which is published in the Sunday edition of The New York Times and as a stand-alone publication...
. His story was also documented in the 1996 Showtime movie
Breaking the Surface: The Greg Louganis StoryBreaking the Surface: The Greg Louganis Story is a 1997 TV-movie about diver Greg Louganis based on the best-selling book Breaking the Surface co-written by Greg Louganis and Eric Marcus that stayed on top of the New York Times Best Seller list for 5 weeks.-Plot:In Seoul, 1988, Greg Louganis hits...
with
Mario LopezMario Michael Lopez, Jr. is an American actor who has appeared on several television series, in films, and on Broadway. He is best known for his portrayal of the character A.C. Slater on Saved By The Bell, which he also portrayed as a regular on Saved by the Bell: The College Years...
playing the lead and Louganis narrating.
He also produced a
video diaryVideo blogging, sometimes shortened to vlogging or vidding or vidblogging is a form of blogging for which the medium is video, and is a form of Web television. Entries often combine embedded video or a video link with supporting text, images, and other metadata. Entries can be recorded in one take...
called
Looking To the Light, which picked up where
Breaking the Surface left off. In the years since his diagnosis was made public, Louganis has been an outspoken HIV awareness advocate.
In the late 1980s and 1990s, he took on a number of roles in movies, including
Touch Me in 1997 and
David OliverasDavid Oliveras is an award-winning American director who won "Best Director" award at the Tampa International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival and "Outstanding First Dramatic Feature" at the Los Angeles Outfest for his 2008 debut feature film Watercolors...
' debut movie
WatercolorsWatercolors is the 2008 award-winning debut feature film by American director David Oliveras and starring Tye Olson, Kyle Clare. The script of the film is written by David Oliveras himself and features diving Olympic diving champion Greg Louganis and two time Golden Globe winner and Academy Award...
in role of Coach Brown, a swimming instructor in a high school.
In September 2000, he appeared on
Hollywood SquaresHollywood Squares is an American panel game show in which two contestants play tic-tac-toe to win cash and prizes. The "board" for the game is a 3 × 3 vertical stack of open-faced cubes, each occupied by a celebrity seated at a desk and facing the contestants...
as a member of famous Olympic gold medalists "Dream Team", competing in a special week of the nationally-syndicated game show series, broadcast as a tribute to the 2000 Summer Games. The episodes marked the first time that all these champions came together for this kind of television competition.
In the October/November 2010 issue of
ABILITY Magazine, Louganis stated that the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy is "absurd," "unconstitutional," and a "witch-hunt." He added that "gay men and women have been serving this country for years. . . [it's] basically encouraging people who are serving our country to lie to each other."
Dog agility
Louganis currently competes actively in dog agility competitions with his dogs, Dr. Schivago, Captain Woof Blitzer, and Dobby. Most of his current competitors are named for characters in the Harry Potter series. He published his book
For the Life of Your Dog co-written with Betty Sicora Siino.
Coaching
Since November 2010, Louganis has been coaching divers of a wide range of ages and abilities in the SoCal Divers Club in
Fullerton, CaliforniaFullerton is a city located in northern Orange County, California. As of the 2010 census, the city had a total population of 135,161.It was founded in 1887 by George and Edward Amerige and named for George H. Fullerton, who secured the land on behalf of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway...
.
Filmography
Films in which Greg Louganis has appeared:
- Dirty Laundry (1987) as Larry
- Inside Out III (1992) as Max in the segment "The Wet Dream"
- Breaking the Surface: The Greg Louganis Story
Breaking the Surface: The Greg Louganis Story is a 1997 TV-movie about diver Greg Louganis based on the best-selling book Breaking the Surface co-written by Greg Louganis and Eric Marcus that stayed on top of the New York Times Best Seller list for 5 weeks.-Plot:In Seoul, 1988, Greg Louganis hits...
(narrator)
- It's My Party (1996) as Dan Zuma
- Broken Record (1997 TV movie) as Coach Hill
- Touch Me (1997) as David
- Watercolors
Watercolors is the 2008 award-winning debut feature film by American director David Oliveras and starring Tye Olson, Kyle Clare. The script of the film is written by David Oliveras himself and features diving Olympic diving champion Greg Louganis and two time Golden Globe winner and Academy Award...
(2008) as Coach Brown
- 30 for 30
30 for 30 is the umbrella title for a series of documentaries airing on ESPN and its sister networks. The series, which premiered in October 2009 and concluded in December 2010, chronicles 30 stories from the "ESPN era," each of which detail the issues, trends, people, teams, or events that...
: "Tim Richmond: To the Limit" (2010)
External links