OLYMPICS REPORT / 26 DAYS TO THE GAMES : Final Dive Carries Clark to Victory

Mary Ellen Clark, who has mastered diving from the 10-meter platform despite suffering from bouts of vertigo, won that event on her final dive at the U.S. Olympic diving trials Saturday at Indianapolis.

Clark, 33, was trailing 18-year-old Becky Ruehl by seven points when she pulled off a solid backward 1 1/2 somersault with 2 1/2 twists.

“I just wanted to go after it because if I was going to be tentative, I would be kicking myself for the rest of my life,” she said.

Hurtling into the water at 31 mph, Clark emerged to see the scoreboard light up with six marks of 9.0 or better, giving her the title with 865.08 points.

In the men’s 10-meter platform, Patrick Jeffrey of Madison, N.J., led after the preliminary round in his bid to make his second Olympic team eight years after competing in the Seoul Games.

Jeffrey had 455.46 points going into today’s final two rounds. David Pichler of Butler, Pa., the current national platform champion, was second with 449.31, and Troy Dumais of Ventura, the youngest men’s competitor at age 16, was third with 430.65.

Clark, of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., won the bronze medal at Barcelona, but missed most of last year because of the vertigo, a terrifying and mysterious condition that causes dizziness.

Ruehl, of Lakeside Park, Ky., and a freshman at Cincinnati, finished second to earn the other Olympic berth in her first trials. Ruehl, the current national platform champion yet a relative newcomer to international competition, had 857.94 points.

Eileen Richetelli of Milford, Conn., the leader through the preliminary and semifinal rounds, botched her fourth dive to drop from first to third, where she finished with 844.71 points. Only the top two finishers qualify for the Olympics.

Near tears, Richetelli, 26, a three-time NCAA platform champion at Stanford, could barely comprehend she lost an Olympic berth by 13 points.

“I can’t even say,” she whispered, her voice trailing off.