Pat McCormick, the first diver to sweep the gold medals in two Olympics, died on Tuesday at an assisted living facility in Santa Ana, Calif. She was 92.
Her daughter, Kelly Robertson, confirmed her death. She said her mother had a number of ailments, including health problems and dementia.
At the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki, Finland, McCormick won the women’s 3-meter springboard and 10-meter platform competitions, the only ones being held for women at the time. In 1956 in Melbourne, Australia, eight months after the birth of her first child — and with her husband, Glenn McCormick, as the team’s coach — she won them both again.
Her feat was unequaled until another American, Greg Louganis, captured the 3-meter and 10-meter titles at the 1988 Seoul Olympics four years after doing it in Los Angeles.
McCormick might have had the chance to accomplish that feat three times: She had passed up her Wilson High School graduation in 1948 to compete in the United States Olympic trials, but she missed making the team by less than a hundredth of a point.
“Because of that failure,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 1987, “I started dreaming about the next Olympics. In ’48, I just wanted to make the team. I was standing there crying after I came up short, and that’s when I decided…
