Diver springing for gold


When she was growing up in the southern Philippines, Sheila Mae Perez’s favourite game was to clamber up on to ships in the harbour of her home town and dive into the water.?"That was my playground," Perez says of the Sasa Wharf in Davao City.


Nowadays the petite 22-year-old is considered one of the best divers in Southeast Asia and life is much less carefree as she prepares for the Beijing Olympics in August.?At the Trace College sports camp in Los Baños, Laguna, south of Manila, Perez repeatedly jumps from a three-metre springboard, twisting and somersaulting before plunging into a deep pool. Emerging from the water, she climbs up to the springboard and dives again. She carries on practicing until her Chinese coach, who trains her mostly through sign language, gives her a thumbs-up sign and an approving nod.?


Perez was discovered in 1997 by local sports officials in Davao who had watched the children diving into the sea and spotted her talent. She is now at the pool for 3-1/2 hours each day and also works out in a gym, practicing somersaults and tumbling.?"I just want to have fun in Beijing," Perez said last week, drying herself before climbing up to the diving platform again. "It’s a very tough field but it’s still anybody’s game. What if they all make a mistake and I am the only one who doesn’t?"?


She became a local heroine after taking three gold medals in the 2005 South East Asian Games in Manila when she won the three-metre springboard, synchronized three-metere springboard and one-metre springboard.


?"Today, Sheila is the best female diver in Southeast Asia," said her coach Zhang De Hu. ?Zhang, who was a top diver himself in Shanghai in the 1960s, was hired in 1997 to help raise the Philippines’ aquatics standards.


Aquatics is one of three disciplines expected to produce an Olympic medal for the Philippines although it has yielded nothing since 1932, when the country won bronze in the men’s 200-metre breaststroke.


??Perez is undaunted by the challenge. "Out there, on the platform, we’re all equal," she said.

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