The Big Dive : Mark Lenzi Found Life After Olympics Way Too Depressing, so He’s Giving It Another Try for ’96

With a repertoire of dives that turned and twisted like the Big Sur coastline, Mark Lenzi figured it was a simple springboard flip to lifelong happiness.

Diving had come so easy. No reason everything else wouldn’t as well. Lenzi had it all, didn’t he?

A year after tumbling his way to the three-meter springboard title in the 1992 Olympic Games at Barcelona, Lenzi discovered the sobering answer. It was staring him in the face, reflecting from another round of drinks.

It wasn’t all right, after all. It was miserable, as depressing as the feckless slug he had become.

“I thought it would be the best time after the Olympics, but it was one of the worst,” he said.

It was so bad that he walked away from diving in 1993, vowing never to return.

But after a two-year retirement, Lenzi, 27, is competing in the U.S. Outdoor Diving Championships this week at Bartlesville, Okla., with hopes of eventually reaching the ’96 Games at Atlanta.

This time, he is armed with perspective and plans to savor the experiences no matter how good or bad.

Last time, Lenzi suffered from post-Games depression, underscoring one of the least talked about conditions facing Olympic champions. So focused on winning gold medals, they often fail to prepare themselves for the rest of their lives and are left with a sense of hopelessness.

At the recent U.S. Swimming Championships in Pasadena, Lea Loveless of Crestwood, N.Y., expressed eerily similar sentiments during a quiet moment after her race, the 100-meter backstroke.

Loveless, 24, brought home gold and silver medals from Barcelona, retired but, like Lenzi, returned to try to make the U.S. team for next summer’s Games.

“There is a slim line for happiness,” she said of winning medals. “The United States is one of the hardest countries to feel proud about what you do. When I came back, all people wanted to know was if I won a gold medal. Everything is based on what hardware you brought back. Maybe you get lost in it.”

Maybe you do. Lenzi surely did, and it ate away his soul.

“I think if I wouldn’t have won in Barcelona, it would have destroyed me,” he said. “Emotionally, I wouldn’t have been able to handle going back to the United States.”

It was difficult enough coming home a winner. Lenzi deftly took the torch from Greg Louganis, star of the 1984 and ’88 Olympics. He expected the same kind of celebrity.

Instead, he got an Andy Warhol dose. His fame ended with as little splash as his trademark 2 1/2 somersault dive.

With no direction, Lenzi returned to Bloomington, Ind., to train with his college coach, Hobie Billingsley. But he was doing it out of habit more than an intense desire.

That year in Bloomington was memorable if only for Lenzi’s inert state. He spent days flipping television channels and nights in local joints.

“It was the only place that I felt I could go and get away from everything else,” Lenzi said. “I was hiding from everything instead of dealing with it.”

He saw a side of himself that was none too flattering. Dick Kimball, Lenzi’s Olympic coach, had seen it before. His son, Bruce, silver medalist in 1984, faced similar demons but with disastrous results. In 1988, Bruce Kimball drove while drunk into a group of Florida teen-agers, killing two and injuring six. He was imprisoned for almost five years.

“[Mark] realizes what Bruce has been through,” Kimball said. “They talk.”

Lenzi said: “For Bruce, as tragic as it was, it probably saved his life. He was probably going down a road that was very destructive. Before I got down that road, I saw it coming. I wasn’t out of control or anything, but I could see myself getting to that point, so that’s when I just said, ‘Hey, I got to get out of this sport.’ ”

One morning, he awoke and said: “Enough is enough.” He decided to enroll in flight school in Stanford, Fla., to get a pilot’s license. He currently is on leave from the ComAir Aviation Academy and reunited with Kimball at the University of Michigan.

While fooling around in a pool in Florida, Lenzi recanted his vow never to dive again. After doing a few flips off the deck, he realized how much he missed it.

Just as suddenly as he left, Lenzi arrived in Ann Arbor two months ago, ready to make a serious stab at his second Olympics. He was 25 pounds overweight and out of shape.

“I was a heifer,” he said.

But the weight was shed quickly, and the fluid dives are returning almost as rapidly. In two months, he has injured both shoulders from the G-force impact of hitting the water, which was to be expected.

Yet, it is not the physical element of diving that will be the biggest obstacle. Where everyone sees improvement is from within. It’s asking tons from America’s most tightly wound diver to suddenly be a stand-up comic. But Lenzi understands the destructive forces at work when he is consumed with seeking the perfect dive.

“He’s much more relaxed now,” Dick Kimball said. “He used to get so mad at himself if he missed a dive. The most difficult thing in diving is to accept a bad workout.”

Lenzi still stews about missing dives for three hours afterward. The intensity that drove him to success within six years has not dissipated entirely. But he balances it, hoping to stay upright instead of uptight.

“Because it happened so fast, I had a tough time accepting I did all these things,” he said. “A lot of times, I’d leave the pool and I’d feel like the person in the pool was not really me--that I was faking and fooling everybody, that I’m not that good.”

Lenzi, once a wrestler from Fredericksburg, Va., started diving when he was 18. He was perpetually trying to catch up with those who had competed most of their lives.

So diving wasn’t only everything, it became the only thing. That became more than his fiancee could handle, and she called off their engagement.

“When I retired from the sport, I wanted to have a normal life again,” Lenzi said. “I didn’t want to have to make the sacrifices such as losing someone you love over a sport, but that’s what I was doing. It meant that much. I thought I had to.”

So, the question is how to remain serious, but not humorless. How to enjoy the fancy flights but make each session count. Lenzi said it is different now because he doesn’t have to win. He isn’t training to be second, but . . .

“I feel like a new man,” he said. “It’s like the new me. Hopefully, the new me will be able to dive well.”