Pioneer U.S. Olympic diving champion

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 backto-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 the University of Southern California.

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 fourtime American gold medalist Greg Louganis.

He was born Samuel Rhee on Aug. 1, 1920, in Fresno to Soonkee Rhee, a farmer, and Eunkee Chun. His father decided his son should use the surname “Lee” because “so many Americans believe I mean Lee when I say Rhee,” his father said in Not Without Honor, Lee’s 1987 biography.

After a fire destroyed their farmhouse, his family moved to Los Angeles in 1925, eventually opening a grocery store and a chop suey restaurant in Highland Park.

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.”