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As a student at the University of Southern California, Blythe Hartley sat in film classes and listened to Hollywood actors Nicholas Cage, Warren Beatty and Annette Bening talk shop.

Back then, Hartley acknowledges, she was star-struck, calling the experience "out of this world."

Today, on the other side of the world from her Calgary training centre, the diver from North Vancouver, B.C., can't afford to be in awe on the Olympic stage.

In a three-metre springboard field featuring two Chinese superstars, Hartley can't afford to be psyched out by athletes who are just as well known in their country as Cage and Beatty are in the United States. She will have to perform before an expected crowd of 17,000 at the National Aquatics Center and not allow the emotion of her Olympic journey cloud her focus in the preliminary round.

While China's Guo Jingjing, the "diving queen," and Wu Minxia, a frequent silver medalist, are competing to continue China's gold-medal sweep in diving and for the glory of their motherland, Hartley has a more personal inspiration.

She has dedicated her Olympics to a fallen sibling whose influence in her life stretches as far as China's Great Wall.

"For me, my oldest brother, Strachan, was the biggest influence on me because he had this amazing drive and this amazing desire to achieve excellence," Hartley said. "He not only showed me about desire, but also showed me how to achieve excellence. For me, my heart will always be broken because he passed away, but the greatest gift he gave me was teaching me how to be my best. He was someone who believed in me more than myself."

In July of 2007, Dr. Strachan Hartley, a former football player at the University of British Columbia and McGill University, died of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. He was 30. He was diagnosed with cancer in his final year of medical school, and McGill's dean of students suggested he drop out.

Undaunted, and while undergoing chemotherapy, Hartley graduated in the top 15 per cent of his class and entered his orthopedic surgery residency. Five weeks before he died, Strachan and Dr. Chloe Roumain-Hartley were married, and on his deathbed, he gave his baby sister a pep talk, telling her she could achieve whatever she set out to do.

Even with those words as a final memory, Hartley was unconvinced. She was sapped of energy and desire. The Edmonton native had competed in two Olympics and won the bronze medal in 10-metre synchronized platform at the Athens Games in 2004.

She was set to retire from diving, not prepared to invest physically, emotionally and psychologically in another year of Olympic preparations after losing her beloved sibling.

"I thought no way, after everything in the summer, I just thought I couldn't," she said. "It was pretty much impossible to pick myself up."

Ultimately, it was thoughts of Strachan that prevented her from quitting.

"In the end, what changed my mind was that he would have wanted me to do," she said. "He would have never wanted me to give up. He always told us to give our best and to be ourselves and I think that's why I'm doing this now."

In June, at the Canadian diving trials near Victoria, not far from her parents' home in Maple Bay, six friends and four family members of Strachan bicycled into the parking lot at Saanich Commonwealth Place. After more than 6,200 kilometres, the coast-to-coast Make a Difference Marathon was complete, having raised more than $300,000 for the Strachan Hartley Legacy Foundation, which provides sports and educational opportunities for underprivileged youth.

Before about 200 people, including the entire Canadian diving community, Blythe's father, Michael, a former Canadian Olympic bobsledder, choked back tears and spoke to the gathering about his son and the foundation.

"We will be here many years from now and we'll change thousands of lives," he said. "This may be the first you've heard of the Strachan Legacy Foundation, but I promise you it won't be the last."

With reports from Dawn Walton