WORLD SPORTS SCENE : Her Olympic Diving Broke New Ground

Aileen Riggins Soule turned 89 Tuesday with the realization that it has been 75 years since she won the initial Olympic springboard diving competition for women.

But that gold medal was only one of many milestones. She is the oldest living American Olympian, having first competed at the 1920 Games in Antwerp when she was a 14-year-old, 65-pound diver. At the 1924 Olympics in Paris, she won a silver in diving and a bronze in the 100-meter backstroke, becoming the first to earn medals in different sports at the same Olympics.

Soule remembers the details of her first Olympics when the U.S. team sailed from New York with 15 women and 400 men.

“And five chaperons,” she said, speaking last week as part of a celebration of 100 years of women in the Olympic movement.

Although some thought it was improper for women to compete, she began swimming and diving at the recommendation of physicians. She barely survived the flu epidemic of 1917 and used water therapy to recuperate.

She has no regrets about her time and place.

“I was born just the right time . . . the first Olympic team for U.S. women,” she said. “It came at the same time as women’s suffrage. The whole world was changing right after World War I.”

Shortly before the 1924 Olympics, Soule was hired as a sportswriter for the New York Evening Post, another breakthrough for women. But she lasted only a few months. When editors asked her to cover Gertrude Ederle’s attempt to become the first woman to swim the English Channel, Soule refused and was fired. If she had covered the story, she would have lost her amateur status, according to the rules in effect at the time.

Later, she appeared in films, and now, living in Honolulu, she still is swimming, having won six gold medals at the master’s world championships in Indianapolis two years ago.

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Last week’s U.S. national diving championships at Midland, Tex., were supposed to be a triumphant return for 1992 silver medalist Scott Donie of Miami. Donie, 26, retired after climbing down from the 10-meter platform during the 1993 Olympic festival, saying he was suffering from post-Olympic depression. Although finishing second in the three-meter springboard competition at Midland, Donie withdrew from the platform after taking warm-ups. “I may have rushed it a little bit,” he said.

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Even as women make inroads in the Olympic movement, some perceptions die hard. Anita DeFrantz, International Olympic Committee executive board member, does not think women’s weightlifting will be accepted soon.

“I fear my colleagues in other parts of the world have not learned to appreciate women’s strength,” she said. “And they have a vision of women weightlifters looking like women bodybuilders, which to many is not what a woman should look like. So they need more education.”

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Joan Benoit Samuelson, winner of the first women’s Olympic marathon in 1984, blamed the American system for the dearth of world-class U.S. long distance runners. The first U.S. man finished 29th at this month’s Boston Marathon.

“It comes down to a university system that rewards young athletes who have not come very close to reaching their potential,” she said. “(They) are expected to compete in cross-country, indoor and outdoor track and we are burning out athletes even before they reach their potential. Once they leave the university system, they are basically chewed up and spit out.”

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Notes

“We’re alive and well,” said Bert Bonanno, director of the Bruce Jenner Classic last week. Well, alive at least after the May 27 track and field meet at San Jose was saved for this year. Disturbed because the meet, a fixture on the 11-year-old Mobil Grand Prix outdoor circuit, was on the brink of extinction because of failure to find sponsors, International Amateur Athletic Federation President Primo Nebiolo of Italy asked the track and field governing body’s marketing agent, ISL, to solve the problem. ISL found sponsors to contribute between $150,000 and $200,000, hardly a world-class budget but enough to guarantee that it will be held as scheduled. “Now, I’ve got to go out and find some athletes,” Bonanno said. Some who will work cheap, he could have added.

Times staff writer Randy Harvey contributed to this column.