‘The biggest win of my life’

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This article was published 30/08/2023 (1091 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Alex Tiaglei had never been higher.

The Winnipeg teen flipped and twirled to gold in the first Pan Am junior high diving championships in Lima, Peru last week. The 17-year-old bested a group of eight divers from the United States, Brazil, Mexico and Canada in the A category (17-19-year-olds), ending with 294.93 points off the daunting 15-metre platform.

“It felt like everything had built up to that one moment and when I was up there, honestly, it felt surreal when I went out of the water and saw my name pop up to the top of the leaderboard, then everyone was cheering,” Tiaglei said Tuesday, less than 24 hours after returning home from the Peruvian capital.

“This competition is the biggest win of my life.”

Indeed, even if Tiaglei never said it, second place was getting old. He transitioned to high diving in February of 2022 after a rocky six years of diving off shallower platforms, but still couldn’t reach the top of the podium in competition. The winless drought had washed away his motivation at times and led him to contemplate giving up diving altogether at one point.

“I went to junior worlds, I competed at senior nationals and at senior nationals, I’ve done well, I’ve been happy with how I’ve competed but I’ve never been at the top,” Tiaglei said. “So I feel like this win was just huge for me because it felt like all my hard work had paid off for this one competition.”

Dallas Ludwick, a renowned coach from the Winnipeg-based Revolution Diving, begged Tiaglei’s parents to enrol the youngster in diving after seeing him around the pool a few times in 2016.

The sport seemed like a good fit for Tiaglei, who had been a competitive gymnast his entire life to that point, he but never quite found his grounding on the shallow platforms.

“There was always something that was difficult for him under pressure, just the head-first dives. Sometimes he would go in amazingly — get some really high scores — but in general, he had a hard time competing and being consistent under pressure. When the high-diving thing came along, it’s like all of that vanished,” said Ludwick, also one of Canada’s senior national team coaches and a former high-level diver.

Tiaglei was one of a few divers who made the jump to a higher platform last February when Diving Canada presented a junior high diving program in Manitoba. Ludwick said the transition was seamless for the youngster and suspected it was Tiaglei’s gymnastics background — which, like high diving, asked him to land on his feet — that allowed for a successful change.

“It’s like the sport was built for him. He learned it so quickly,” Ludwick said.

Tiaglei has since competed on the national and international stage in the sport, pushing the limits with each leap. Ludwick has had a front-row seat to all of it, which made it that much sweeter when she got a text from her pupil on Sunday from his hotel room in Peru: “I did it.”

“This is a kid who’s never on the top of the podium. He’s always working his butt off, he’s always improving, he’s always pushing himself. He never loses a chance to take the lesson and he’s had many disappointments — he’s had some good achievements — but he’s never been No. 1. So this is a huge moment,” Ludwick said.

“My observation is that humans are pretty good at categorizing themselves. So your results write the narrative that you start to believe. No matter what your ambitions are, if you’re always second, you’re always third or fourth, then you start to believe that that’s where you belong,” she continued. “He’s a very humble kid. But I think inside he always wanted to be on top. But he’s very humble and kind of accepted the situation and I think this is a huge motivator. I think it’s going to rewrite the narrative for him.”

Tiaglei will enjoy a recovery week then fly to Mostar, Bosnia on Monday where he will train with some of the best cliff divers in the world as a part of the Red Bull cliff diving World Series. It’s his third trip to Bosnia and another chance for him to reach another milestone, as he’ll leap from the Stari Most bridge, 21m above the Neretva River.

One day, Tiaglei will try his hand off the 27m platform.

“For me, one goal would be Red Bull cliff diving because it’s been here for years now and it is the biggest cliff diving competition in the world,” Tiaglei said.

jfreysam@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @jfreysam