A few years ago, when I was writing something I don’t even remember anymore, I needed a name to use in a story. Because of the parameters of the story, it needed to be the name of a well-known, young, somewhat exotic, attractive, successful, and completely unobtainable female. The canon was to use Jessica Alba, Paris Hilton, or that actress from Battlestar Gallactica (choose your favorite), but I decided to go a different route, as I tend to do. I picked Guo Jingjing, and I’ve been using her name ever since.
So, who is she? Guo Jingjing was one, if not the, preeminent 3-meter springboard diver in the world up until her (alleged, but not certain) retirement last year.
I misjudged on the “well-known” aspect. She’s a household name to millions of people, but if you’re reading this blog, chances are that you know only a few of them–perhaps none other than myself. Tabling that aspect for a moment, let’s go down the list and see if she qualifies:
She’s young; well, 29 seems young enough to me. She was younger a few years ago. Plus, as a diver and professional athlete, she has a physique that defies time.
She’s somewhat exotic; with a name like Jingjing, she doesn’t really need to do anything additional to qualify.
She’s attractive enough to have a successful modeling career; these things are subjective, of course, but many people think she looks good.
She’s successful; her product endorsement and modeling careers have made her one of the wealthiest women in the PRC, according to what I’ve read. She moves a lot of Wheaties, among other things. In her core competency, she won individual and/or synchronized events the world cup in 1999, 2000, 2002, and 2004; the world championships in 2001, 2003, 2005, 2007, and 2009; the diving world cup in 1995, 2000, 2002, and 2004, and gold medals in the Olympics in 2004 and 2008. She has a heap of other medals from the most competitive events in the world of diving, but these are the highlights.
Finally, she’s unobtainable in the way that only a person from the other side of the world, who speaks no languages that I know, has her own security detail, is considered a state treasure of China, and has a jealous playboy billionaire boyfriend can be.
We all know that sometimes a modicum of success (or even no success whatsoever, but simply being in the right place at the right time) can be leveraged by a savvy agent into an enormous career. Is Miss Guo really that good, or does she just have a good marketing department?
She really is that good.
Consider her performance in the 2008 Olympics. In Olympic Women’s Springboard, each diver performs five dives per round. At this level of competition, each dive is crucial; a single error can cause a diver to drop several places in the rankings. A dive that does not match the basic elements of its description–a so-called ‘fail dive’–can eliminate a diver entirely.
By the third and final round, there are only twelve divers remaining. Each round starts with a fresh new score sheet; an outstanding score in the first round will not save you from mistakes made in the second round, and nothing can save you from mistakes made in the third.
It would be tempting to say that if Miss Guo had entirely flubbed one of her dives in the last round, throwing away 20% of her score, she would have still won, but that simply wouldn’t be true. That would be analogous to playing basketball or hockey a man short. At this level, nobody can afford to sacrifice 20% of their score. She was competing against the best divers in the world, a cohort who could hold their own against any team of divers in history.
She would have finished sixth.
