Diver, first Asian-American to win Olympic medal

LOS ANGELES — Sammy Lee, the son of Korean immigrants who overcame discrimination to become the first Asian American to win an Olympic medal and the first diver to win back-to-back gold medals in two different Olympics, has died. He was 96.

Lee, a retired doctor, died in Newport Beach on Friday after suffering from pneumonia, according to Tim Tessalone, sports information director at USC.

He followed his victory in platform diving in the London Games of 1948 with gold in the same event in 1952 in Helsinki. He later coached Olympians, including four-time American gold medalist Greg Louganis.

Lee learned to dive at Pasadena’s Brookside Park pool, which until 1940 allowed people of color to use the facilities only on Wednesdays, the day before it was drained and refilled. His most reliable place to work out was waterless, a diving board installed over a sand pit he dug in his coach’s backyard.

The inescapable racism “inspired me to perform,” Lee told the Los Angeles Times in 2011. “I was angered, but I was going to prove that in America, I could do anything.”

At 12, he was exposed to the Olympics while riding in his father’s Model T truck through Los Angeles streets decked out for the 1932 competition. When his father explained that the Games crown “the greatest athletes in the world,” Lee vowed to become an Olympic champion.

That summer, while playing at a Highland Park pool, a friend challenged him to do more than a single flip off the diving board. With his friend jumping behind him to provide extra lift, Lee immediately did a 11⁄2 somersault and ran home to tell his family he had found his sport, the Journal of Olympic History reported in 2002.

His Olympic quest began in earnest in the summer of 1938, while he was sneaking in practice dives between meets at Los Angeles Swim Stadium near the Coliseum. He looked over to see a bear of a man named Jim Ryan, who needled him to do a swan dive.

“I did what I thought was this perfect dive,” Lee told the journal. “He said, ‘Who taught you that?’ When I told him, he said, ‘I want you to go over and kick him right in the butt. He’s trying to ruin you.’ ”

Ryan was nursing a grudge that rivaled his huge frame. He had coached Farid Simaika of Egypt to the gold at the 1928 Olympics but because of a “scoring error,” Simaika took home the silver instead, the journal recounted. The gold went to Pete Desjardins, an American.

Cursing the judges, Ryan vowed to return with a nonwhite diver who could win without question.

“You are that diver,” Simaika told Lee. “That is why he is so tough on you. You will have to earn that gold by doing dives so well that they will not notice your color but only your diving.”

While attending Occidental College, Lee had become the 1942 national champion in platform and 3-meter springboard diving and won the platform title again in 1946. But World War II canceled the 1940 and 1944 Games, delaying his Olympic debut.

He finally reached the Games in 1948. As a 28-year-old lieutenant in the Army medical corps, Lee feared he had bellyflopped on his last dive at the London competition, a then-unprecedented 31⁄2 somersault, but emerged from the water to discover it had been rated almost perfect.

“I just walked on water out of that pool,” he later recalled. He already had won the bronze medal in the three-meter springboard.

Lee