BARCELONA ’92 OLYMPICS : It’s Nearly Perfect for Chinese Divers : Men’s platform: They take first and third. Sun Shuwei wins with four 10s on his final dive. Donie is surprise silver medalist.

High anxiety.

That’s what you get when you start sending Olympic divers--some of them grown-ups, some not--off a platform 33 feet in the air with all that pressure and all those judges sitting by the side of pool with their red coats on in the middle of the afternoon when it’s a million degrees out.

You get a gentle 28-year-old American named Matt Scoggin doing the man-falling-out-a-window back smack, right in the middle of the competition.

You get China’s Sun Shuwei, 16 years old with the innocent face of a 10-year-old, spinning impossibly fast and knifing into the water as if he were a needle dropped into a glass of water. You get him clinching the gold medal on his last dive with four perfect scores among his 677.31 points. And saying afterward: “I think (my youth) reduces the pressure on me.”

And you get Scott Donie, from Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., cool and solid all afternoon, ripping splendid dives on his fourth and seventh attempts and winning a silver medal with 633.63 points, sandwiched between Sun and his teammate, Xiong Ni, who scored 600.15. And then waving the flag in a peculiar fashion. “It’s nice to see that a capitalist system like America can compete with the Chinese,” he said. “I came out of nowhere.”

That is the kind of day it was.

Sun’s victory gave China three of the four gold medals in diving--American Mark Lenzi got the fourth--fulfilling the promise of Seoul in ‘88, when Chinese divers won two golds, three silvers and a bronze and would have won all four golds if American Greg Louganis had not been there.

It was not Scoggin’s day. On his difficult seventh dive--a back 3 1/2 somersault, tuck position--he did something he has not done in 15 years of diving.

He leaped away from the concrete platform, began spinning, and as he grabbed for his legs, his left arm slipped, throwing off the delicate balance of the dive. He thrashed through the air--”trying to land on my head,” he said--before smacking the water on his back. It was a frightful moment, relieved only when Scoggin climbed out of the pool, albeit in obvious pain.

“I lost my left leg,” Scoggin said. “And then I got completely lost. There was just this one split second before I hit the water that I realized I was going to hit on my back. It did cross my mind that I was going to smack in front of millions and millions of people.”

Then came the pain, which Scoggin said, “was very intense for about 20 seconds.”

The judges scored his dive as “failed,” which means no points.

But Scoggin got back on the platform for his next dive. His back was crimson, but the crowd cheered his recovery. It was suggested to him that perhaps he couldn’t wait to get back on that old platform.

“Oh, I could wait,” Scoggin said. “I could definitely wait.”

But he did his remaining three dives and didn’t even finish last. He was 10th of 12.

Donie was sensational. He was excellent on his fourth dive and moved into fourth place; then again on his seventh and moved to second.

He never watched the scoreboard or the Chinese, because he never does. He played video golf between dives and listened to music on the platform. “ ‘Bird Song,’ by the Grateful Dead,” Donie said.

Diving Medalists

DIVING (Men’s platform)

GOLD: Sun Shuwei (China)

SILVER: Scott Donie (United States)

BRONZE: Xiong Ni (China)