BARCELONA ’92 OLYMPICS / DAY 5 : Lenzi Brings Drama Home : Diving: One-time wrestler puts on a rewarding show for family and friends in winning springboard event.

This is the Olympics: Mark Lenzi’s mother and father sitting Wednesday among the spectators, wearing sleeveless T-shirts with scraggly hand-stitched lettering proclaiming their son a participant in the men’s springboard diving final. You could spot them a mile away, demonstratively proud of their son.

And this: Back home in Fredericksburg, Va., Lenzi’s two brothers, his sister and who knows how many friends and neighbors gathered around the TV to watch Mark, 24, an ocean away, complete his unlikely transformation from a high school wrestler to an Olympic diving champion in only six years.

“We bought the TripleCast,” said Lenzi’s mother Ellie, “and we just invited a lot of friends to be there. The kids called from home (Tuesday night) to say they were putting up balloons and everything for the final. Right now, they’re probably partying. Big time.”

With good reason. Lenzi won with 676.530 points. Tan Liangde of China scored 645.570 for the silver medal, and Dmitri Saoutine of the Commonwealth of Independent States, 627.780 for the bronze.

World champion Kent Ferguson of Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., rallied into contention but had a poor final dive and finished fifth at 609.120.

How something as impossibly large as the Olympics can have such intimacy continues to be one of its wonders, the way it can enable us to see Lenzi’s day--a theatrical, tension-building triumph--through the eyes of a parent.

“It was kind of fun watching the preliminaries,” Lenzi’s mother said, “and, starting out today, it was fun too. But then, the closer they got to the end, it got a little tense. It got kind of stressful.”

While Lenzi, taking advantage of his progressively more difficult dives as the competition unfolded, eased up in the standings from eighth to fourth to third, Germany’s Albin Killat and China’s Tan were moving smoothly along in first and second place.

They were almost mechanical in their precision, taking such care that they appeared to be moving in slow motion--touching their toes, jack-knifing, pirouetting and tumbling before disappearing virtually without a sound or splash. Lenzi said he wasn’t watching the others. He sat between turns, closing out the world with his Walkman and “just paying attention to my own list” of dives.

Bill Lenzi, Mark’s father and a Navy physicist, was in the crowd, “worried about the pressure” and thinking about 1986.

“Mark was a high school wrestler then,” he said. “A real good wrestler, I thought. And I was worried about sending him to college, because we don’t have that much money. And he said he had had enough wrestling, that he wanted to become a diver.

“We had a real falling out over that. He even went and lived with a neighbor for a while.”

Lenzi watched Greg Louganis win two diving gold medals in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics on television and decided: “Louganis makes that look so easy. I want to do that.”

Not long after Lenzi began trying the sport, the diving board at the pool in Fredericksburg was removed because there was no money for the insurance costs. Lenzi began searching for diving clubs. Two months after he began competing, he was offered the first of several diving scholarships, eventually taking one to Indiana University.

“I was flabbergasted,” his father said. “But very happy and proud.”

As he was again Wednesday.

On the seventh of the 11 rounds of diving, Killat suddenly did a belly flop, missing a forward 3 1/2 somersault badly. Tan got sloppy on a reverse 2 1/2, his legs flipping too far forward on entry. Lenzi, with a clean backward 2 1/2, rushed to the lead and two dives later wowed the judges--they all gave him a 9.0 of a possible 10--on the same dive that had beaten Killat.

“Sometimes,” Bill Lenzi said, “maybe parents don’t know what’s best for their kids. Can I give him a hug now?”

Diving Medalists

MEN’S SPRINGBOARD

GOLD: Mark Lenzi (United States)

SILVER: Tan Liangde (China)

BRONZE: Dmitri Saoutine (CIS)