Who Is The Greatest Diver Of All Time?
Well, it depends what you're measuring.
By medals, it's Wu Minxia. Seven Olympic medals, five of them gold, more than any diver in history.
By influence on the sport, it's Greg Louganis. Fewer medals, but he changed what people thought was possible and was ahead of his time.
The case for Wu Minxia
Seven Olympic medals across four Games. Five golds, which nobody else in diving has. She was still winning at 30, which in diving is extremely impressive given how hard it is on the body.
She's also part of the most dominant run any country has had in any Olympic sport, which is a separate conversation worth having on its own.
If the question is who won the most at the Olympics, this isn't close.
The case for Greg Louganis
Four golds and a silver, which is a smaller haul. But two things make his case strong.
Most divers specialize in either springboard or platform. He swept both the springboard and platform events at consecutive Olympics, in 1984 and 1988. No man had done that before, and doing it twice in a row in both events is very difficult when you realize that others are 100% focused on one of those events.
The other aspect was how popular he was in pop culture, and the infamous board hit at the Seoul 1988 Games.
That clip is the most replayed moment in the sport, and I wrote about what actually happened in why don't divers hit the board.
Why the debate doesn't really work
Unfortunately, the sport has changed over the years.
The dives being done today are harder than what won gold in the eighties. Degrees of difficulty have crept up, training methods are better, and tactics like the bubble machine let divers learn hard dives faster and more safely than they could a generation ago.
It's the same problem every basketball fan runs into when debating the best team of all time. The sport changed over time and it's hard to compare.
Others in the conversation
Chen Ruolin won five golds and was untouchable on platform for two Olympic cycles.
Guo Jingjing took six medals including four golds and was the face of springboard diving for a decade. She also suffered from horrible vision, which made it even more impressive.
Tom Daley won't top any medal table, but almost nobody has done more to make people care about diving.
And my personal favorite, Qiu Bo, who never actually won an Olympic gold, but dominated the 10 meter platform for nearly a decade with four World Championship gold medals and the Olympic silver medal in London 2012.
The final answer
And it's a little bit of a cop out, because the greatest diver is the one that inspires you the most.
Louganis was ahead of his time and inspired a generation of divers, while the modern divers show what the human body is capable of at the limits of the sport.
- DG