One of the greatest divers in the history of the sport, Greg Louganis swept the springboard and platform competitions in back to back Olympic games in 1984 and 1988, a first for male athletes.
Still, such fame led nowhere. He didn’t even get on a Wheaties box. In the new sports documentary “Back on Board: Greg Louganis” (HBO, 10 p.m.), filmmakers Cheryl Furjanic and Will Sweeney suggest that the not-quite-open knowledge that Louganis was gay and was HiV positive froze him out of the usual kinds of job that follow such Olympic success.
Louganis’ sunny personality, though, and quite a lot of spectacular footage of his winning run make the film compelling. And he’s still not completely bitter about what happened, he told reporters at the TV Critics Association summer press tour last week.
“I really wasn’t in it for the money,” Louganis, 55, said. In 1984, he added, “the advertisers just rallied around Mary Lou Retton.”
Neither did he get any work doing commentary for, say, NBC in future Olympic broadcasts. He was lined up for 1992, he said, “because I was HIV positive, and somebody slipped out my HIV status.”
“I think in ’92, I think it was more fear of my health status,” Louganis said. “Because in ’92, people were still dying.”
“I was diagnosed with HIV six months prior to the Olympic games in 1988,” he said. “And so I honestly, I knew those were my last competitive dives because we still viewed HIV/AIDS as a death sentence, and I never thought I’d see 30. And then 30 goes by. And then 40 goes by…. So then I’m like going, oh, shit, I got to get a job.”
He currently is a mentor and coach for USA Diving and he’ll be going to the games in Rio for Canada’s Global TV.