 Hi, I'm Kate Young, and you're listening to This is Purdue, the official podcast for Purdue University. As a Purdue alum and Indiana native, I know firsthand about the family of students and professors who are in it together, persistently pursuing and relentlessly rethinking. Who are the next game changers, difference makers, ceiling breakers, innovators? Who are these boiler makers? Join me as we feature students, faculty and alumni taking small steps toward their giant leaps and inspiring others to do the same. I started diving in 2000, goodness it's been 21 years now since I've been in this sport, but there has been a lot of adversity that's happened, a lot of heights, triumphs and a lot of defeats as well, but I think all of that encompasses just a good athlete journey. The most decorated Purdue University diving Olympian, David Bodaya, joins us on this episode of This is Purdue. I'm going to be honest, we did this interview prior to the US Olympic Diving Trials in Indianapolis in June, prior to David placing third, just missing the cutoff to head to what would have been his fourth Olympic Games in Tokyo, Japan, prior to knowing that two other Purdue divers would be going to the Olympics instead of David. But as I listened back to this interview with David, it was amazing how much of it foreshadowed the adversity he would soon face at these Olympic Trials. So now we're pivoting. We're telling the story of Purdue diving legend David Bodaya and the legacy he's left at Purdue University. We'll start at the beginning. David takes us back to how his diving journey got started. The goal was when I was seven years old, watching the 96 Olympic Games was to make it to the Olympics. I was doing gymnastics at the time. I was doing other sports and I wanted to achieve this dream that I had a little bit. I know it'd be in a sport called diving that I had never heard of before. Some friends introduced me to the sport and I guess the rest is history. David has four Olympic medals, including one gold, one silver and two bronze. He went to Beijing in 2008, London in 2012 and Rio in 2016. During training for his fourth Olympic Games, he made the switch from the 10 meter platform to the three meter springboard. I did the past three Olympics on the two meter platform. I did an individual event and then synchronized event with somebody else trying to mirror image each other. Platform is difficult in that it's scary. There's a lot of fear that's involved because you're 33 feet up in the air, three story building, diving head first at 35 miles an hour. And so I think the anxiety for that fear is different than what you experience on springboard. Three meter is not as scary, but one of the hardest things on the springboard event is there's a variable now where something underneath my feet is moving. That creates anxiety of itself, but you know, the switch happened just after the Rio Games. I took a year off and then decided to make one more push towards another Olympic Games. And it's something that I did while I was at Purdue, competed for swimming and diving. And I never really got to see what my full greatest potential was on this event and wanted to see what that looked like with my career. I'm 32 now, and typically they say your prime's 23, 24. So I'm older in the event. And so I've noticed recovery is a lot harder to do. If I have an injury, it takes a little bit longer to overcome it. But with springboard, there's not as much impact on your body. So it's a little easier to train than it was on the 10 meter platform. When David won gold in London in the 10 meter platform, he finished ahead of a world champion from China and a UK hometown favorite. It was the first Olympic gold for the United States in diving since the 2000 Summer Olympics, plus the first Olympic gold in the 10 meter platform by an American male diver since 1988. David talks about this gold medal winning moment. Take us back to the London Olympics. What did you feel like when you emerged from the pool and had that gold medal dive? I think one of the coolest things in competition that an athlete can experience is when they're in the zone. There's a ton of movies that depict it quite well. And, you know, when you're in a competition, one of the things that I've learned and that really came together in London was really just keeping these blinders on. So I had a routine that I would do, you know, I would sit, I would play Tetris and listen to music when it was about time for me to go. I would get warmed up. I would go see my coach here at Purdue, Adam, and then I would get up to the platform. But really, you hear the noise of the audience, but you have your blinders on. And so my focus is just tunnel vision where I'm just strictly focused on what I'm supposed to do to taking off this platform. And I never looked at what place I was in. If I made a dive, that was extremely well. What scores those were. So at the end of it, I was just hoping to be, you know, top five. You know, I felt good during the competition that I turned around. My name was on the first place tag right there and was in shock to say the least. One of the coolest things that I've heard, one of the best quotes that I've heard actually is from John Wooden, who UCLA basketball coach also a Purdue basketball player. He said, if you focus on the things that you can't control, it adversely affects the things that you can control. And so really, when I'm going into a competition, whether it's in London or Rio, ultimately I have no control of what my competitors are going to do or what the scores are from the judges are going to be or what place my name is going to be on the award stand. So what I can control are the six dives that I do in competition, doing them one at a time. And so for me, it's not helpful to know exactly where I'm at in that competition. And every athlete is different. It's just something that you have to learn for yourself in competition. David tells us what it's like to train for the Olympics for days, months and years, only to have it all over within a matter of seconds. That's years of work. And then, you know, your dive is what, like 10 seconds? Yeah, maybe. How do you feel when you're on the diving board at the Olympics about to do this dive that you've trained so many years for? Yeah, I think that's probably one of the best things that I love about competing is that pressure that you get because you're training four to five hours a day, five to six days a week, 300 days a year for a matter of eight and a half seconds and a competition and that can go really well or it can go really bad. When I was younger, working on that mental game, that allowed me to want to step up to these high pressure situations and actually one thrive in it, but also enjoy it. I don't think most people would say they enjoy pressure, but I think it's a challenge and I think that is what I like most about it. But there is no other feeling than standing up on a string board after training years and years and years in front of thousands of people and having millions of people back home or watching this. If you stop and think about it for a second, it's not good. When I'm in competition, it's really I put my blinders on. I think about what I'm supposed to do in that moment, not dwell in the past and not get anxious for the future about what's going on here now. Following the 2016 Olympics, David knew he was either going to retire or take a much needed break just after the 2016 games. I knew that when I was either done or I needed definitely take a break. I hadn't had anything longer than three months since I started my diving career. For me, that was to take a step back. I really wanted to be done and or take this break because it was what people were telling me that I should do. I'm like, oh, you're old. You should probably move on with your life. And so I I started to believe that like, all right, yeah, maybe you're right. I've always been interested in real estate. And so I just after the games, studied to get my license and started buying and selling for a little bit and realized I was listening to these other people telling me what I think I should do instead of I'm still healthy. I was still in really good shape and I still had a drive to do it. So I can't redeem the time that I've lost. I don't want to go 10 years from now and say what if. So I decided to try to do both and one of them had to let down the other because it was too stressful. So I decided to put a pause button or hold on real estate and pursue this Tokyo games full-time. He took the plunge and started training for Tokyo. As this summer Olympic games grew closer though, the entire world was put on hold. The COVID-19 pandemic postponed the 2020 Tokyo games, the first such postponement in Olympic history. David tells us about why he started welcoming adversity into his training and how it prepared him for something massive. Something like well, the biggest competition of his life being postponed. Every single one of us has experienced their plans not being fulfilled. If anything this past year during this pandemic has taught us that we can plan something, but we need to have it with an open palm because it could change in a blink of an eye. But when I look back at my career, one of the biggest challenges I had early on was a fear of 10 meter. And at a young age, I started working with sports psychologist. An outcome goal is what I ultimately want to accomplish. The process is how I was going to get to that point. Another way is relaxation of individualization. And when you look at adversity, I think one of the biggest things that you learn from it is from mistakes and early on in my career I had plenty of those and one of the things that I don't think I was the most talented diver physically, but one of the things that I worked on was how can I prepare and out train everyone else mentally. So I was start to invite adversity into training. And so whether that would look like my teammate standing behind the board trying to distract me or we would turn music up loud so I would get distracted that way or just from experiencing competitions. But that was one of the things that I trained really hard on early in my career. So now fast forward, you get news that the Olympics has been postponed and it's just another way to toughen up and figure out how to get through this mentally. Obviously it was a struggle. One of the things that we did during pandemic and during the lockdown specifically was we made our home kind of my training facility. So I brought mats from Purdue University over to my house and I did my flip training on the ground there and I took over my kids trampoline and did training there and I mean you make it work. If something's important to you then you're going to figure out a way to make it happen. And this was one of those things that it was important to us. So we needed to make sure we were staying on top of the game. And you just mentioned your kids, you know, you travel a lot. I'm sure previous to COVID that is. But what was it like, you know, being home more and how did that kind of impact the way that you thought about the Olympics? The nature of my job is not just diving in the pool as a professional athlete. I'm going to sponsor events where maybe I'm doing a keynote speech for a conference that they're doing or a meet and greet in Texas or whatever it might be going into 2020. We knew that it was going to be extremely busy. I would be home and then on the road again, but with the lockdown and created an opportunity where I got to just be home with my kids. I think when they think back of what the lockdown was like for them, it's going to be a totally different experience than what most of us experience. They're going to see mom and dad are home and we're going on picnics and hikes and go to the creek and jumping on the trampoline and just all these quality time activities that we wouldn't have normally got to do. Right. Absolutely. I know I always think about I go on walks at lunchtime now and we got a dog and there's just so many things that I don't think would have happened had all of this craziness not happened. It's kind of nice. Like life can slow down a little bit and I think when you stop and I guess breathe and all the worries or stress that you might have if anything this past year has taught us to just stop for a second and just be thankful for just the here now. David recently appeared in the weight of gold in HBO sports documentary exploring the mental health challenges that Olympic athletes often face. Olympic swimming legend Michael Phelps served as an executive producer on this film and legendary athletes like Apollo Ono, Sean White, Lolo Jones, Gracie Gold, Sasha Cohen and more went into great detail on the dire mental health situation amongst these elite athletes which heightened with the postponement of the Olympics. I really wanted to do my research here so I watched the documentary and wow I think so many of us myself included assume these top tier athletes are rich famous and well really happy. In reality these athletes are facing loneliness depression stress over things like income and family life and the pressure of being the best. I truly recommend you watch the weight of gold for yourself. It's powerful and it shines an important light on mental health struggles that even and maybe especially gold medalists face. What was it like sharing those really intimate details of your life with the world? When I was approached about this documentary with Michael Phelps one of the things that I wanted to do was to be able to share struggles that athletes, elite athletes have. And one of the goals that I had when I wrote my book greater than gold and 2016 was to just share that your struggles are the same as mine and this is how I got through it and hopefully that's an encouragement to somebody else. But I think it shines an important light on you know depression doesn't discriminate and it's okay to ask for help and one of the ways that you know I've seen success in that is having people around me a tight knit circle who one is going to hold me accountable but two is also going to listen to my struggles and my fears so that I might go on the right path at a young age. I put so much hope in this destination of if I get to the Olympic games then I'm going to experience fame and riches and success and at the end of those games that was the exact office of what I thought I wanted. And so that left me into a deep depression and I think not knowing what my purpose was so before I would say diving is who I am. Now I say diving is something that I do it's not who I am and going forward my purpose is not just to win the Olympics but also to live out my faith. As he mentioned David wrote his first book greater than gold in 2016. It details why David bought into this American dream that fame wealth and success would satisfy him and how he came to the realization that none of these things actually made him happy and fulfilled. One of the things that I tried to do in greater than gold was to kind of lay out look we all have faults and failures and you can either let that consume you and listen to the thoughts and the lies that are coming into your head or can do the opposite. You can look at it and then move on from those mistakes and then also learn how to when these lies come into my head how do I speak truth into them so that they are not dominating me and so there's a number of topics in the book that is helpful for whether you're an upcoming athlete or someone who is just trying to look for ways to just move forward with your goals. Right and I know especially with the boom of social media you know you're comparing yourself to other people and even people like you who are gold medalists Olympic athletes people would be like oh that guy has it all together he has everything and your goodness your whole point with this is kind of to say no and shine that light on that so that's really special you've talked so much about the pressure since coming out about your depression and mental health and everything has the way that you've trained changed at all. No I think because that was a battle you know I think that's one of the forks in the road where it's a roller coaster ride when you're trying to train for the Olympics where you're trying to figure out what you're going to do after college there's a lot of high highs and a lot of low lows and you learn from those mistakes and if I was dwelling on it I would allow it to define what it looks like for me to train but that was in the past doesn't mean it can't happen again but we're trying to be diligent and just trying to get better every day whether that's in the pool or outside of the pool. High highs and low lows I'm sure the day that David finished third at the Olympic trials by a small margin was a low low for him but Boilermakers keep going and David keeps going following his defeat in June David released the following statement on his Instagram. The pain of defeat that's sports for you a roller coaster of highs and lows I couldn't help but leave the pool last night filled with joy. It's easy to let yourself go down the path of things you could have done different. It's good to learn from your mistakes but dwelling on them will leave you discontent and that is not how I want to end my fight this week. You have two choices in these moments stay in defeat or move forward. I choose to move forward with joy and contentment. David also said his daughter Mila greeted him at home with the question. Have you ever caught a firefly? He says that simple question put everything into perspective for him. David and his wife Sunny who he met while attending Purdue still live in the Lafayette area even after they both graduated. He explains why Purdue has always felt like home to him. Before I decided to come to Purdue one of the things that I was I didn't want to come to Purdue because it was so close to home. Once I got to campus and met the team and met the people who were in the athletic department and walked around campus to see what it would look like academically. It kind of just felt like home but I knew that I wanted to continue to pursue my diving career after I graduated and so we made Purdue our home and that my wife's family is all from Lafayette area and my family is now in Lafayette and so this is where we wanted to raise our kids and build our home and I think being on campus every day Purdue just makes it easy to accomplish your goals and what they have to offer even post collegiate career. And after all of the highs and lows wins and defeats David will be home for good now as a full time assistant coach with Purdue swimming and diving. He tells us what he admires most about his relationship with Purdue's head diving coach Adam Soldati 10 time Big 10 diving coach of the year. I think what makes Adam unique and why he's had so much success at Purdue I would challenge he's probably one of the most successful coaches at Purdue University if not the Big 10 just the awards that he's won and what he's produced. One of the things that stuck with me before I decided to come to Purdue he met with me and he had said you know David I'm not going to promise I'm going to make it Olympic champion but what I can promise is I'm going to create an environment where a champion can be made for me. I was like OK well that's not a hard sell you're not going to say you're going to make me Olympic champion. But when I stepped back for a second like he was going to quit me with every single tool that I needed to be able to accomplish that goal. And I think what's unique about Adam is that he pushes you as an athlete but he cares more about who you are as a person outside of the pool than who you are inside of the pool. So he's trying to develop a male or female to have character whether that's in competition or in the classroom and I just can't say enough good things about the guy. And what about the legacy and impact this Olympic gold medalist has made at Purdue. You've trained at the Burke Aquatic Center for years. What is it like when you go in there and your face is everywhere and all these banners and everything. I think when they approached me with the idea of like we're going to put like your picture up and then some accolades and I was like oh that's pretty cool. And then I walked in and I was like holy cow. It's like the whole wall and the divers tease me like this is your shrine now it's put things out from under like it's hilarious how much bigger I thought it would be but you know I think that just speaks to one of the things that I experienced on the podium in London was it's hard to explain but when you're on the podium there's a wave of emotions that come in and the only thing I could think of was like this wasn't just me in this moment to get me to this point you know Adam had to sacrifice had plenty of teachers who had to help me through this and trainers and family members and one of the coolest things was when I was on the podium listening to the National Anthem we had my family my fiancee at the time Sonny who's now my wife all to the left of me and on the other side was a whole John Purdue Club congregation and so it was like the people who helped get me to this point are now you know kind of encircling me and we're good to celebrate this special moment with each other. David also shared some advice for incoming Purdue students and especially his future diving mentees. I think if you went back to my academic advisor she is still here and Nicole McKinney she would say this kid's not going to make it after his freshman year. I think you're just thrown into it and you're like how do I balance life. I think every freshman experiences this but because I had the resources that Purdue like Nicole McKinney to help I just kind of figure out this is what needs to happen it can seem overwhelming but why do you break it up like let's figure out this class and then this one and then prioritize your time. But I think the resources that was available to myself and then other athletes and students allows you to be able to pave a road for success. Yeah and I'm glad you highlighted that because you think about the normal freshman coming in and it's a lot. That's a ton. You're away from home and you're on your own and multi-tasking and then you throw in all of the training that comes with being an athlete at Purdue so that's not easy I'm sure. I think it's helpful that someone else is struggling with you so I think when you feel like you're struggling alone it's hard to accomplish something but when someone is there that can empathize with your struggle and makes it a little bit easier to come out of the I guess the darkness that it could be and not being afraid to ask for help. I've been able to be around multiple waves of Purdue divers and I think one of the things I tell them is to go talk to your professor like just go up and introduce yourself day one. It's going to be awkward out of all get out but if you can have a relationship where you're communicating back and forth they see that you're caring about what you're going to do in this class. I think it just helps that much more. We've talked about David's experience at the U.S. Diving Trials but who is going to Tokyo for Team USA? Purdue's diving dynasty once again came out on top and you will see two Purdue divers at the Olympics. We caught up with Purdue alum Brandon Lociavo who is heading to his first Olympics at the Morgan J. Burke Aquatic Center. What does it mean to him to hear the word Olympian? I mean it was a unreal experience and I'm excited to go to the Olympics. I think I'm still a little bit like on cloud nine I'm just kind of like floating around and you know doing all these interviews. I'm excited to get back to training and then I look forward to the experience of actually being in the games and kind of seeing this like dream come into fruition. Brandon an NCAA champion continue to train here at Purdue before going to Tokyo. He tells us what it means to him to represent Purdue and the U.S. I mean it's just an honor to do it for such a great school and then to add to the reputation especially just like what Adam has created at this pool is just unbelievable. I mean it's just an honor and I'm super excited to do what I can for the country and Purdue. The opportunities they gave me in the first place let that be on the academic sphere. The professors that I've met that have pushed me outside of the pool. It's just amazing. I mean if anything I can do to give back to Purdue I would gladly do it. So just having the opportunity to represent Purdue as an Olympian just means the world to me. Along with Brandon Purdue diver Tyler Downs is making his first Olympic appearance after winning the men's three meter springboard competition at the U.S. diving trials. It's clear why David is an icon and why so many Purdue divers look up to him. Tyler told NBC Sports after his Olympic trials win. I think David is a legend. He won gold in London three Olympic games. He's an amazing person as well a really great mentor. Here's Brandon again. Yeah Dave's always been like the ultimate goal is to get to where he's been. I mean it's one thing to be an Olympian. Yes, but to to win the Olympics and to show how dominant he is on the Olympic arena is just unbelievable. I think my favorite part is like when you see him at the Olympics he looks like he's at a regular meet. And I think that's something I've always looked up to is the sheer confidence he has. I mean it just looks like he's just floating through the competition. He just enjoys every moment and so at some point I was like I need to strive for that mental clarity of what he has and so it's an honor to dive below him and then to strive for him. I think Brandon says it best about the Purdue University community. Purdue let there be alumni that aren't here and then the divers that are here right now. They push each and every one of us and it is unbelievable. It's an unbelievable family. Purdue has eight athletes going to the Olympics in Tokyo as of early July. Two divers Brandon and Tyler as we mentioned one swimmer one volleyball player and four track and field athletes. If you'd like to learn more about Purdue's presence at the Tokyo Olympics please visit Purdue dot University slash Olympics. Thanks for listening to This is Purdue. For more information on this episode visit our website at Purdue dot edu slash podcast. There you can head over to your favorite podcast app to subscribe and leave us a review and as always Boiler up.