US diver Boudia mastered early fears on road to gold

LONDON _David Boudia looked like a beautiful gull plunging into the water. A dive from the great height of an Olympic 10-meter platform once "petrified" him, as it would any thinking person, but the American college student was both fearless and heedless of pressure Saturday night, delivering himself into the air and then spinning and plummeting to one of the most stunning upset gold medals of the London Games.

The platform event is all about creating elegance out of terror, about overcoming stomachclenching, follicle-raising dread. The 10-metre tower stands as tall as the top floor of a townhouse. As Boudia said, "You have to be crazy to jump from a three-story building and hit the water at 35 miles an hour."

In addition, there was the increasingly compressed nervous pressure on the favored competitors at the Aquatics Centre, most especially on a dominant world champion from China, Qiu Bo, and a British marquee star, Tom Daley. As the competition came down to one last dive, Boudia, a brush-haired, hazel-eyed 23-year-old Purdue student, controlled his mind best and crafted the winning performance, with a wheeling back 2 1/2 somersaults and 2 1/2 twists that got the highest score of the night.

Boudia didn't know it at the time - "Once I went into the water, I didn't know where I was placed," he said, but his score of 102.6 was enough to put him ahead of Daley, who had taken just a fractional lead after the fifth round. And it held up even when Qiu, the seemingly unbeatable world champion, performed a somersaulting, twisting last plunge that earned a 100.8.

Boudia finished with 568.65 points, ahead of Qiu's silver medal total of 566.85 and Daley's bronze total of 556.95, to become the first American man to win a 10-meter platform gold since Greg Louganis in 1988. "To think 10 years ago I was petrified to jump a off 10meter platform, and now I'm Olympic champion, it's crazy," Boudia said.