Four-time Olympic diving medalist David Boudia is missing this week’s national championships and next month’s FINA World Cup, the biggest competition of the year, due to a concussion suffered in a crash off the 10m platform.
“Since February I’ve been struggling with dizziness, blackouts, numbness, and fatigue which I assumed resulted from high anxiety from a crash I had from 10m (Having struggled with high anxiety in the past I choose to push through it and chalked it to that),” was posted on Boudia’s social media Monday. “After going to our team physician, the crash resulted in a concussion and was not resolving due to a lack of recovery (continuing to dive on my head). Unfortunately, this means that I will be out of competition for our major events (National Championship & World Cup) because of the time off to recover. Hard to swallow that having been training for almost a year to get back to elite competition which mean I get to choose to be content with the end goal in mind and push on towards #tokyo2020 and more importantly trusting in the Lord’s plan for my pursuit toward diving and giving up my own plans.”
Boudia, 29, has not competed since taking individual bronze and synchronized silver on the platform in Rio. He also earned individual gold and synchro bronze in 2012.
He considered retirement after his third Olympics but announced in September he planned to return to competition this year after taking the 2017 season off, missing the world championships for the first time in a senior career that dates to 2005.
“I just missed the relationships that I had at the pool, that I had with the diving community,” Boudia said then in West Lafayette, Ind., where he trains at Purdue University. “I don’t want to be 35, 40 years old and say what if I would have given it another shot? Kind of too late at that point.”
Boudia, after never taking more than three months away from diving since 2000, turned to real estate after the Rio Games.
“If you would have asked me in 2015 if I was done [after Rio], I would have said yes; I was drained,” Boudia said in September. “One of the big reasons, apart from being exhausted mentally, I just felt like [diving] wasn’t what I was supposed to do. You have all the people saying, oh, you’re getting older. You’re 28. You need to start retiring, thinking about what you’re going to do next in life. It’s fun banter. My teammates would call me grandpa. In my mind, I was thinking, maybe it’s time for me to be done in the sport. I let it simmer.”
Boudia’s platform gold in 2012 ended a medal drought for U.S. divers in individual events since Laura Wilkinson‘s surprise Sydney 2000 title.
Boudia is the only U.S. male diver to top the Olympic platform since Greg Louganis, who swept the springboard and platform in 1984 and 1988.
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