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Canada's Emilie Heymans, from Montreal, perfoms a dive to place fourth in the women's 10-metre platform semi-final. (Paul Chiasson/CP)
BEIJING — Even in her finest moment, after a lifetime performance that was golden but for the perfection of a Chinese rival, Canadian diver Émilie Heymans remained Émilie the Enigma.
She won silver Thursday night in the women's 10-metre platform, a sensational silver that put her into Canadian Olympic annals — only the fifth athlete to win medals in three successive Games. She worked 15 years and three quadrennials for this hour, and she won her first individual medal even when the recent evidence suggested the best days had past.
Yet on the podium, but for a brief flash of teeth when shaking hands with the medal presenter, there was no smile. When she received her bouquet of roses, she kept her head bowed.
"Talking about Émilie's personality, even to us who are with her every day for years and years, she is still an enigma," Diving Canada chief technical officer Mitch Geller said. "We don't really know what makes her smile and what doesn't. She is so like that — so unique, such an individual. We just try to go along for the ride as best we can."
The ride Thursday was awesome. And the smiles eventually came.
In the medal-winners' press conference, Heymans struck a cutting figure beside her competitors. She has lost a few pounds, and gained definition, in the two months since the Canadian diving trials.
Fifteen-year-old gold medalist Chen Ruolin and 16-year-old bronze medallist Wang Xin, neither taller than 4-foot-6 and weighing a combined 128 lbs., are schoolgirls everywhere but a diving platform.
Heymans is a woman: 5-foot-7 and 137 lbs.
Two days earlier, in the same room and with a Canadian and Chinese sitting in precisely the same chairs, Alexandre Despatie bumped fists with his fellow medallists, talked glowingly about them and their country. His enthusiasm broke their stoicism.
Heymans nearly broke the Chinese where it counts — the diving board — and when sitting with then and wearing a headset — similar to the iPod she uses between dives to "shut the world out" — she didn't bump fists or offer platitudes.
Émilie the Enigma studied them.
"I've been in press conferences in China before but they don't have the translation so I don't understand what they're saying," she said when asked why she seemed so amused in the postmortem and so expressionless on the podium. "It was really fun to hear what they were saying."
Despatie called the Chinese divers his friends. When asked if she was friends with Chen and Wang, Heymans said: "I wouldn't say we are friends because for me, a friend is someone who really cares about me. And I don't think they really care about me."
Friend or foe, Heymans tested the medalists' mettle.
Upon winning, Chen began bawling and collapsed into the arms of her coach. She wasn't like that upon taking gold in the synchronized platform competition last week. Few Chinese divers had worn their insides on their exteriors like Chen, yet that is what Heymans pulled out of the gold medallist: her physical, mental and emotional everything.
It was the most foreign of sites, but the pressure the Canadian exerted on her was the exact type of pressure that Geller has talked about as the only way to crack the Chinese.
On her fourth dive, Heymans lived Geller's talk. She nailed a reverse 3 ˝ somersault and scored 95.20. After Chen followed with an 89.10, the ordinals flashed: Canada 1, China 2.
Another foreign site.
The sellout crowd of 17,000 at the National Aquatics Center gasped before drawing silent.
On the final dive, Heymans kept up the pressure. Chen needed an 89.65 to win the gold, which meant she needed her best score of the night, and the best dive of her life.
To the untrained eye, gold slipped through Heymans fingers. But the diving community knew how well Chen performed her final dive, and that she often received perfect 10s.
Sure enough, the score flashed 100.30.
China has now won all seven gold medals awarded in Beijing, with just one diving competition remaining.
Born in Brussels to Belgian parents, Heymans moved to Quebec at age 1, some five years after her mother competed at the Montreal Olympics in fencing. She began diving at 11, and qualified for the 2000 Games at age 18. But the Greenfield Park resident had not made an Olympic or world championship podium in a singles event since world 10-metre champion in 2003.
So Émilie the Enigma made some changes.
She switched coaches in 2005 and new tutor Yi Hua, a former Chinese diver, said she moved from "withdrawn" to an athlete with "self esteem."
Heymans, 26, also committed to greater psychological training. She used the phrase "stay focused" countless times on Thursday, saying she had experienced a "rough time" of late, which she later identified as qualifying for just one event in Beijing.
In Sydney, an arm-stand dive thwarted her chances. On Thursday, she aced the same dive.
In 2004 in Athens, she was in strong medal position before flubbing her final attempt. She did that same dive in the first round on Thursday, and she was spot on.
"J'ai choké," Heymans said to the French press, using a verb that need no translation.
"I've grown a lot since Athens," she said. "A lot of things have changed."
Geller provided more context: "I know there was a lot of soul-searching, a lot of wondering is she was going to keep at. I think we're a little bit fortunate, because had Athens paid off, we wouldn't have seen her here today."
At the Canadian diving trials near Victoria two months ago, Heymans and partner Marie-Čve Marleau, who finished seventh Thursday, were upset in the synchronized platform competition.
As people gathered poolside with hugs, kisses and congratulations for the winning team of Roseline Filion and Meaghan Benfeito, Heymans marched with a determined stride to the other side of the deck. Without a single glance at Marleau standing a few steps away, Heymans packed her bag with mechanical efficiency and walked directly out of Saanich Commonwealth Place without a solitary word.
The Canadian diving community had gathered as one, but Emilie the Enigma was in the parking lot.
"I really felt that not qualifying for the synchro was going to increase her odds of an outstanding individual performance," Geller said. "It puts the pressure on her. [Heymans and Marleau] were in a stronger position for a synchro medal, than she was for an individual medal."
For Geller, it meant "the most spectacular female tower diver in the world" could not take the "easy way out" and win a medal with a teammate in a weaker field. She had to conquer the best.
"Sometimes, she'll take the path of least resistance," he said.
Not surprisingly, Heymans disagreed with that theory. She said she believed she had a legitimate chance of two medals, and still rued qualifying for just one event.
In the press conference, Heymans was asked why there was no release of emotion, why there was no unabashed joy, why all that hard work and all those years didn't produce the conventional reaction that even Chen mustered.
"It's really hard to explain," she said. "I'm just a person who usually tries to keep my feelings inside and it's really hard for me to just let everything go."
Émilie the Enigma. Even while basking in Olympic glory.
