Blood mixed with chlorine. It gushed out of her nose and forehead and swirled in the Montreal pool around her injured body, there on live national Canadian television, in front of her coaches, competitors and family. All eyes were fixed on this girl who had hit her head on the springboard and dropped into the water.
In a move of international solidarity – after all, this was the 2005 World Championships – a German diving coach jumped into the pool as Chelsea Davis floated up to the water’s surface. The lifeguards put the young diver on a backboard and removed her from the pool.
“Oh my God, this can’t be happening to me,” Davis thought. She was angry more than anything.
“I was in shock, but there was no pain,” she later recalled.
The injury could have been career-threatening, but Davis wouldn’t let it derail her. In her diving journal, Davis wrote in entry after entry after the mishap, “I’m so anxious to get back-” After six weeks, she returned to the board.
In a sport where splashes are supposed to be minimal, Davis has made big ones – and save for the Montreal accident, it’s all been in a figurative sense.
As a sophomore at Worthington Kilbourne High School in Columbus, Ohio, in 2002-03, Davis won every meet, including the Ohio state championship, and was honored as an All-American. She won six U.S. Junior National Championships from 2003-05 and set school records in the six- and 11-foot diving disciplines.
Davis placed second in the 2004 Senior Nationals, cementing her place as an elite diver.
Now a Weinberg freshman, Davis has won 10 of her team’s 14 events this season, and finished second in the other four.
“She is without a doubt the most talented diver Northwestern has ever seen,” NU swimming coach Jimmy Tierney said.
Despite the swim team’s loss last Saturday at Tennessee, Davis won the one- and three-meter springboard diving events. On Jan. 10 she was named the Big Ten diver of the week for the third time this season, becoming the first NU diver ever to achieve that feat.
But as impressive as her collegiate accomplishments have been, Davis has bigger ambitions.
“My ultimate goal is to dive in China,” Davis said of her desire to go to the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. “I think I have a good chance to do it.”
She’ll be competing at a selection camp for the United States dive team on Jan. 11-15 in Indianapolis. The event gives young Olympic hopefuls a chance to mingle with each other and also several former Olympians.
On her chances to qualify, NU diving coach Tom Micha
