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Purdue Club hears how diving success can be springboard for life
It may have seemed --- well, a little crazy -- for an Olympic silver medalist to hand over his priceless medallion to about 40 people he’d never met before and let the object of his world-class accomplishment at the 2016 Summer Games in Rio wander its way around the room from hand to neck to the next eager hands.
But that’s exactly what Purdue University sophomore diver Steele Johnson did Thursday night as he and his award-winning Boilermaker coach, Adam Soldati, addressed a dinner meeting of the Purdue Club of Putnam County.
Yep, Johnson let everyone in the dining room at Autumn Glen in Greencastle touch the silver medal, hoist it, feel it, bite it and photograph again and again the 500-gram silver award, the heaviest medal ever produced for an Olympics. Those 500 grams of sterling silver carry a street value of $305.
So call him crazy for letting out of his sight the silver medal that represents 12-and-a-half years of eight-hours-a-day, six-days-a-week training that helped make the 20-year-old Johnson an Olympic star after he and Purdue teammate David Boudia won the silver at Rio de Janeiro in the men’s 10-meter synchronized platform diving competition.
Yay, crazy ... just like coach Soldati said.
“Who walks up three stories high, throws their body off and hits the water at 35 miles per hour that‘s not crazy?” he asked.
Well, Johnson for one. But that may be changing.
“He’s coming off the tower, learning more springboard events,” Soldati said of the Indianapolis native. “He might have more potential there, we don’t know.”
What Soldati does know is how to coach.
A California native and -- yes, it’s true -- Indiana University graduate, Soldati arrived at Purdue in 2005 and has since won NCAA Coach of the Year four times and Big Ten Coach of the Year seven times. Not only that, but the Boilermaker diving recordbook has been rewritten with all 30 positions on the springboards and the platform top 10 lists now occupied by Soldati-coached divers.
Yet he calls it a ”total waste” if all that he helps produce are medal winners, Soldati told the local Purdue brethren. “It’s not my job to create a champion,” he said. “My job is to create an environment where you can become a champion.”
Facilities are important to success, the Purdue coach said, along with some infrastructure.
“But they’re not the most important thing,” Soldati noted. “It’s about people, your leadership and the environment fostered.”
His divers are people first, he said, then student athletes. “You can’t do the second without the first,” he stressed.
Soldati said the characteristics important to his diving program are the same as those he teaches his family (he and wife Kimiko have six kids).
A hallmark of his philosophy, Soldati said, is self-sacrifice without expecting anything in return.
“My kids hear that all the time and my athletes hear it all the time,” he assured.
“We work very hard on how to think,” he added, “and how to think how to dive. How to think how to live.”
Soldati, who coached both Boudia and Johnson in the 2016 Games at Rio and helped prepare Boudia in the 2012 Olympics at London, told the local club he is “very proud of Steele,” but not just for his diving successes.
“I’m most proud not because of the medals or the NCAA championship or Big 10 titles or diver this or diver that,” Soldati said. “We all know these medals are going to tarnish.
“I’m most proud of his character and that he cares deeply about his Lord and Saviour, his teammates and Purdue University and he understands the big picture.”
Johnson also extremely enjoyed the Olympic experience, saying “one of the coolest parts” was the opening ceremonies and walking through the tunnel with his teammates “with everybody chanting ‘USA! USA! USA!’”
“You watch it all on TV so long and you dream about, and then when you’re actually there, it feels like a dream,” Johnson confided.
In four years, Tokyo will be the scene of the next Olympics -- “If I qualify,” he humbly added.
“Life after Purdue” for the silver medalist likely means documentary film making, but that’s “eight years down the road, and hopefully after two more Olympics,” Johnson added.
Now that doesn’t seem crazy at all.