The Toronto Sun - Saturday April 26, 2003 Amateur Sports Weekly Dive Talkin' By Jason Paul

Kristy Wanner spent years on the beam, hours upon hours of training in her efforts to be the best gymnast in Canada.

Now, she has plunged head first into a completely different sport to be the best at -- diving.

The 24-year-old spent 13 years pushing her body to the extremes in gymnastics. A Canadian national team member for six years in the 1990s, Wanner hit her peak as Canadian beam champion in 1994.

Things looked to be on target for the 1996 Olympics, but Wanner was knocked out of the previous year's world championships because of injury, and Canada qualified only six athletes for Atlanta. The decision to retire became an easy one after 40-hour training weeks, the pounding on her body and her advancing age.

"It felt pretty heartbreaking at the time to not make the Olympics," said Wanner, who trained in Perth, Australia in 1990-91 when her family moved but returned because she wanted to compete for Canada.

"To train for that long and not get there was disappointing but it was time to move on."

And move on she did. While wrapping up her studies at Milliken Mills high school in Markham, it was suggested Wanner, then 18, check out diving -- first, at the Scarborough Diving Club and for the past six years at the Central Toronto Diving Club at the University of Toronto.

"A lot of the techniques are the same except you land on your head instead of your feet," Wanner said. "I started so late in diving, so I had a lot to catch up on."

While the training is a bit less than gymnastics -- Wanner does about four hours a day -- her diving has improved by leaps and bounds.

"She came to the sport relatively late but there are parallels,"said Anna Dacyshyn, Wanner's coach at U of T. "The big difference is in the takeoff and entry. Kristy is extremely talented and is really focused on being one of the best in Canada."

Wanner landed a diving scholarship to the University of Michigan after only two years in the sport.

Wanner proved to be equally outstanding in the classroom, graduating with a Master of Education in counseling psychology with a perfect grade point average to earn Academic all-American honours.

"My first love is gymnastics but love of anything comes with time," said Wanner, who finished third in the one-metre final at last year's Canadian winter diving championships and 11th in three-metre final.

As Wanner moves up the ladder, luck hasn't always been on her side.

There weren't any national-level divers to train with at U of T, so she decided to move to Ottawa because there were two elite divers living there, one of whom became her synchro partner. But in a bad twist, both quit and now Wanner is back to training on her own.

And in her first taste of international competition -- Wanner entered the Spain Grand Prix last month in Madrid -- she came down with a sinus and ear infection and didn't perform to her expectations.

"I guess it was bad timing," she said of the move. "I'll just have to be more self-motivating.

"I'm hoping now to land some sponsorship so I can focus on diving more full-time."

While diving hardly gets a sniff of media attention, Canada has put together a world-class team -- led by Alexandre Despatie -- and is considered one of the best diving countries in the world.

"Diving has really improved in the past eight years in Canada," Dacyshyn said. "Kristy just needs to get more practice. She really works hard to improve and she has the ability to be a great springboard diver."