Diver’s drive fuelled world-class career
Good thing Roseline Filion never listened to the reasons why she would never become an Olympic diver.
She couldn’t jump high enough. She lacked world-class speed. She created too much splash upon entry.
But at 29, Filion officially announced her retirement late Sunday night as a two-time Olympic bronze medallist and three-time world championship medallist in the 10-metre synchro.
“I think I’ve been the most underestimated athlete in diving for a very long time,” Filion, a Commonwealth and Pan Am Games champion, told Postmedia News on Monday. “It feels like the story of my life.
“But that’s OK. Everyone is allowed to have their opinions about my performances, and that’s fine. I never let those comments become my reality.”
Filion created her own reality in spite of what the critics said along the way.
“She is so determined,” Meaghan Benfeito, her diving partner, said. “She is someone not many people believed in at the beginning, but she proved everyone wrong.”
Filion, an Olympic medallist in London and Rio de Janeiro, is already hard at work in a couple of different areas. In October, she opened a team-building business with her family called Immersia Escape Games in her hometown of Laval, Que.
Her legacy in diving is profound.
“She made a lot of experts question their abilities to forecast who might be successful and who might not,” said Mitch Geller, chief technical officer for Diving Canada. “She broke a lot of rules in terms of what the perfect profile for an athlete is. It turns out that you better understand how committed an athlete is and what level of persistence an athlete brings to the game — because without that information, there is no expert out there.”