OLYMPIC TRIALS ROUNDUP : Ovenhouse, LaFace Get Diving Team Berths

Julie Ovenhouse dominated the competition by a 76-point margin, and Karen LaFace completed her comeback from an arm injury to win berths on the U.S. team in the three-meter springboard at the Olympic diving trials Thursday night in Indianapolis.

Ovenhouse of Howell, Mich., and LaFace defeated 10 other divers in the finals and will compete in the Barcelona Olympics in July.

Ovenhouse, the reigning national springboard champion, scored 1084.59 points. She led by 54 points after the preliminaries and was never challenged in the finals.

“I was watching the scoreboard for second and third,” she said.

LaFace led Wendy Lucero-Schayes by 11 points going into the 10th and final dive. Both women completed inward 2 1/2 somersaults, but LaFace outscored Lucero-Schayes 68.85-64.80 to claim the second Olympic berth.

“If I didn’t hit those last two dives, it probably would’ve been my last meet,” said LaFace, who plans to enter medical school after the Olympics.

LaFace scored 1007.94 points and Lucero-Schayes finished third with 992.87. She failed to qualify for her second consecutive Olympic team.

Indiana University diver Mark Lenzi, the two-time national three-meter springboard champion, placed first in the preliminaries in the U.S. Olympic trials at Indianapolis.

“Ever since the first day I got on the board, I knew I would make the Olympics. I didn’t know when, but I always felt I’d make it,” said Lenzi, who scored 687.57 points in the preliminaries.

Mark Bradshaw, who finished fifth in the 1988 Olympics, is second at 678.63, and four-time national champion Kent Ferguson is third at 662.100.

All 12 participants moved into today’s finals, and the two Olympic representatives will be determined by the combined scores.

Lenzi, 23, got a late start in his career, switching to diving from wrestling as a high school senior in Fredericksburg, Va.

He moved into the lead on the first of his six optional dives, slipped to second in the next round, moved ahead to stay in the eighth round and got his highest score on the ninth round with 85.56 points when he received four 9s and three 9.5s from the judges for a forward 3 1/2 somersault in the pike position.

He led Bradshaw by nearly 20 points going into the final round, when he did a reverse 3 1/2 somersault that has a 3.5 degree of difficulty, the most difficult of his program. He received 69.30 for the dive, with marks from 6.0 to 7.5.

Michael Matz moved a step closer to a spot on the U.S. Equestrian Olympic Team when he rode Heisman to a faultless round at the fifth selection trials at Gladstone, N.J.

The 41-year-old horseman and the 14-year-old German-bred stallion jumped all 17 barriers within the 80 seconds allowed to post his fourth clear round in the five events.

The Matz-Heisman combination has been charged with only four penalties for one rail knocked down at the second selection event at the Devon Horse Show in Devon, Pa., last month.

A four-member U.S. team will be named when the double round final trial concludes Saturday.

New Jersey Net guard Drazen Petrovic of Croatia and Indiana Pacer forward Detlef Schrempf of Germany are only two of the five NBA players taking part in the European Olympic qualifying tournament, which opens today in Spain.

Other familiar names include Golden State Warrior guard Sarunas Marciulionis (Lithuania), Atlanta Hawk forward Alexander Volkov (Commonwealth of Independent States) and former Phoenix Sun center Georgi Glouchkov (Bulgaria).

Twenty-five nations will compete for the four European Olympic berths. Among the pre-tournament favorites are Germany, Croatia, Lithuania, Italy, Israel and the CIS. Spain automatically qualifies for the Olympics as the host nation.