KIMIKO
HIRAI SOLDATI
OFFICIAL SITE
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OFFICIAL SITE |
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Remembering -- and reflecting -- a mother's strengthBy Pat Borzi, NBCOlympics.com
POSTED: Wednesday, July 7, 7:39 p.m. The gifts and accompanying notes come periodically to U.S. Olympic diver Kimiko Soldati on special occasions. Her 18th birthday. Her 25th birthday. Shortly before her wedding day. And each time she opens a gift and reads the note in her mother's shaky handwriting, Soldati says, "I cry and cry." Sometimes Soldati wipes away the tears with her left hand, the one where the ring finger bears her mother's platinum wedding band -- one of the many gifts Soldati received over the years. It reminds Soldati of her mother's inner strength and selflessness during a time of great sadness.
Judy Hirai died in 1991 after a lengthy battle with breast cancer. In her final months, knowing the disease would take her life, she wrapped gifts and wrote notes for her husband Gary to give to their daughter at specific times in the future. "She had it all planned out," Gary Hirai says. "That's how she was. She wasn't going to be there, but she wanted Kimiko to know she was still there in spirit." Soldati was entering her senior year in high school in Longmont, Colo., when her mother passed away. Even on her mother's sickest days, Soldati says, she stayed strong. She insisted Kimiko and her older brother Chris, then in college at Notre Dame, study hard and maintain their daily routines. "I'm amazed how she embraced life, because she didn't know how many days she was going to have," Soldati says. "When she was sick, she was really sick towards the end. I'm absolutely amazed how normal she kept our home. My brother and myself, we knew she was sick and she was dying, but she never turned the focus on herself. She never got depressed and made it about herself. She was always giving to those around her." Soldati's mother lived long enough to watch her daughter begin diving. Soldati had been a promising gymnast until tearing the anterior cruciate ligament in her right knee on a dismount her freshman year at Longmont High School. Gary Hirai, a physical therapist, feared Soldati might suffer lifelong knee problems if she continued in gymnastics and suggested she try diving. Though Soldati diminishes her early attempts ("I don't know if you could call it diving," she said), she showed enough ability to be recruited by Colorado State, where she first competed on the 3m springboard. After two years she transferred to Indiana, which had a better diving program. There she met her future husband, Adam Soldati, a diver on the men's team. And there she tore up her right shoulder on an awkward platform dive, leading to the first of four surgeries that interrupted her career. (She also has had three knee surgeries, two on the right.) "People say, 'Don't you have a bionic shoulder by now?'" Soldati says. "I say, 'I wish I did, because I wouldn't be in pain.'"
It took until this year, at age 30, for Soldati to finally dive at the Olympic Trials. She and her best friend and training partner, Laura Wilkinson, the 10m platform gold medalist in Sydney, hoped to qualify for Athens together in synchronized platform, but instead took second behind Sara Hildebrand and Cassandra Cardinell. Each later made the team by winning individual events, Soldati the springboard and Wilkinson the platform. Like everything else in Soldati's diving career, her victory didn't go smoothly. Leading after the preliminaries, she dropped to second behind Rachelle Kunkel in the final after a poor second dive, an inward 2 1/2 pike somersault -- always her most troublesome. "She's a little stinker for putting us through that," says Gary Hirai, who watched from the stands in St. Peters, Mo., with about 30 relatives and friends. "But I was fairly confident. I spent the week with her before the Trials and got to watch practice. She was doing pretty well." "When I missed that dive, I dug deep," Soldati says. "I said, 'I've been through too much in my life to not let go of this dive and let this opportunity slip away.'" Soldati regained the lead on her third dive, a front 3 1/2 pike with a 3.1 degree of difficulty -- the hardest in her program, and one of the toughest for women. Two more nearly flawless dives later, Soldati was going to Athens. She knew she made it when she emerged from the water on her final dive and saw her coach, Kenny Armstrong, bolt out of his chair. A gleeful Soldati pointed at her family and blew kisses to them. "When she hit the water on the last dive, it was extremely emotional," said Adam Soldati, who coaches a junior team in The Woodlands, Texas, where Kimiko trains. "Everybody around me was crying. Just seeing her reaction alone made you cry. Kimiko is such an expressive person, you could see just by looking at her what she was feeling. It brought tears to my eyes." Because she wears a wrap on her left hand and wrist, Soldati switches her mother's wedding band to her right hand when she dives. Gary Hirai says Kimiko brings another gift from her mother to the board as well. "She's kind of always had the focus and the drive," he said. "Her mother was similar. She focused on things, and went all out when she found out what she wanted to do. I don't think Kimiko realized it until not so long ago." |
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