VEXED BY VERTIGO

U.S. Olympic platform diver Mary Ellen Clark has been laid low by dizziness

by Leigh Montville

from Sports Illustrated August 7, 1995

The dizziness arrived with one simple dive. Mary Ellen Clark wasn't even working off the 10-meter platform, from which she had earned her 1992 Olympic bronze medal, twisting and turning, flipping and falling 33 feet to hit the chlorinated water as a 118-pound, 30-mph bullet. No, she was on the one-meter springboard, no different from the hey-ma diving board at the local Holiday Inn. And she was just warming up, for goodness' sake.

One moment she was following her familiar routine, bouncing into the air, going into a basic 2-1/2 tuck. The next moment she was hitting the water, maybe a little bit off-kilter, maybe not, but certainly in a different medical condition. Dizzy.

"January 18," the 32-year-old Clark says, reading from a brown leather day planner in which she has kept notes on all of this. "I came out of the water and told my coach I didn't feel right. I said that I should take a break for a while."

The break has lasted for the better part of six months. One word, vertigo, underlined twice at the head of the next planner page, describes the problem. The best female diver in the country cannot dive because she's dizzy.

Her frustrations are written in her own tidy hand. How does she make the spinning stop? She is fine in everyday life, driving around Fort Lauderdale, where she lives, in her white Celica convertible, preaching the merits of Interior Design Nutritionals and Speedo swimwear. She can run. She can lift weights. She can do all the average things that average people do. It is only when she returns to the board or even to the training harness and does any dive more complicated than a single somersault that the dizziness returns. She comes out of the water feeling as if she were leaving Space Mountain.

How does she make the spinning stop? Atlanta 1996 is drawing closer and closer. The clock is ticking.

She is a compact woman with a blonde business haircut and an excited way of talking. Tenacity is one of her strengths. Fearlessness too. Her coach, Ron O'Brien, the coach of Greg Louganis, says that all topflight divers, those who reach his program at the International Swimming Hall of Fame pool in Fort Lauderdale, are people who are not afraid to jump out of planes. The platform divers are simply the ones who don't need parachutes. The impact of diving from the tower is so substantial that most platform divers practice no more than 30 dives in a day and then stay away from the platform for two days to let their bodies heal. Joints become stiff. Shoulders separate. This is not a sport for the timid.

"January 30," Clark says. "I had an EKG to rule out head and brain things. That came back fine. I had hot air blown into my ears. I became dizzier when the air was blown into my right ear. That's when I heard the term 'benign paroxysmal positional vertigo.' I also did this vision thing, following a red dot, to see which ear was affected. This also indicated the right."

She came to the platform late. That is her story. She always had been a diver, part of a diving family, the youngest of seven kids in Newtown Square, Pa. Her father, Gene, an IBM salesman, had been a college diver. There was a trampoline in the backyard for practice. Hooked by the TV coverage of American gold medalist Jenny Chandler in Montreal in 1976, Clark followed the competitive route through high school and then to Penn State on a scholarship. Her goal was to qualify for national teams, but she was always short of that until she found the platform in the summer of '84, after her junior year in college. Just fooling around, someone challenged her to try the big dive. She stood at the top for a half hour before doing a basic 2-1/2. That was the beginning.

"February 7, something like that," Clark reads. "There was an article in The Miami Herald about vertigo. They said there was a Dizziness and Balance Center at the University of Miami. I said, 'There's a place for people like me?' The article also said the Mayo Clinic was where the most vertigo research was done. I called and asked for the name of a person in the Lauderdale area who had taken the Mayo course. They gave me Dr. Susan Herdman. She had a serious waiting list, but I started pleading. I said I had a dilemma, that I was a diver and the Pan Am Games were coming up and I had to find out if I could go and ... there was a cancellation. She introduced me to the Canalith Repositioning Procedure."

Success off the platform kept Clark in diving after college. She went to Ohio State in 1987 to earn a master's degree in physical education and continue training. She made the national team. The first appearance of her dizziness came in '88 when she returned to Columbus from a Southern Cross event in Australia. She was doing a normal backward 2-1/2 from the three-meter springboard. She landed and was dizzy. The dizziness continued, but she also continued. She doesn't know exactly how. She had always closed her eyes when she hit the water because she wore contact lenses, but now she would become so disoriented that sometimes she would swim toward the bottom of the pool rather than to the top. She asked her friends to watch her, to pull her out when she went the wrong way.

"The Canalith Repositioning Procedure involves lying on your side on a table and turning your head while it hangs over the end at a 45-degree angle," Clark says. "Then the procedure is repeated on the other side. For the next 48 hours you wear a surgical collar so you can't move your head. You have to sleep sitting up. Then for the next five days you sleep on your unaffected side. The theory is that there are crystals attached to the hairlike structures in the inner ear. Something you do, some movement, can knock the crystals off the hairs. When you spin and then stop, the crystals keep moving. The hope is to reattach them. I have done the Canalith Repositioning Procedure six times now. People see me in the collar and ask if I was in a car accident."

In 1988 the dizziness stopped after five months. Simply went away. Clark moved to Florida to work with O'Brien. Here-worked her list of eight dives, making her learn four new ones. In '91, disappointed by a 10th-place finish at the Pan Ams in Havana, she considered quitting. Was it worth it to work so hard for another year? "You've been doing this for 22 years," O'Brien told her. "It's worth it just to see if it was worth it." As she stood on the platform for her final dive at the 1992 Olympic trials in Indianapolis, she looked at the spot on the wall where the names of the two qualifiers for Barcelona would be painted. She was leading for the final spot by only one point. The final dive meant everything. She envisioned her name on the wall. She dived. She made the team.

"March," she says. "Now some stories about my problem had been written. I got a lot of calls. A woman suggested I take ginkgo biloba, from the oldest tree on the planet. I took it. I went to see Paula Allia, a therapist. I had neck X-rays taken. They were negative. I had a hearing test from a Dr. Attarian. A Dr. Hanft prescribed Hismanal. I took it. It made me more dizzy. It made me sick. I stopped taking it. I took a test in a rotating chair! The chair was inside a thing like anigloo. Complete darkness. The chair started rotating in one direction for a while and then stopped abruptly. I felt like I still was moving. Then we did the other direction. Same thing. They said, 'Mary Ellen, we're going to go a little faster.' That thing flew. I tested fine on the rotating chair. Normal."

"I went to acupuncture," she says of the cures she has sought since January. "I went first to Dr. Lee, who stuck needles in my ear, and then to Dr. Nevel, who stuck needles in my lower back. I still go to him. I took more homeopathic remedies. I have a list: rhubarb, dragon bone, oyster shell, cinnamon twigs, ginseng, ginger and a lot of Chinese herbs I can't name. I still take them, eight pills, four times a day, in addition to my vitamins. A mother of a student of my friend Julie Bell, who's a high school teacher, suggested niacin. I took that. I went to the Upledger Institute of Cranio Sacral Therapy in West Palm. They rubbed my back and neck to 'loosen the fascia.' I only went once. Someone suggested I call a man named Pete Egoscue in California. He works with Jack Nicklaus. I talked to him for a half hour. He asked me to do certain things, like stand against a wall. I did them. The last thing he asked was that I come see him in San Diego. I said I didn't have the money for that. I did buy his book. I took meclizine after all, on the instruction of Dr. Vince Wroblewski. It made me exhausted. I told him I won't be dizzy because I won't be awake. I took Tegretol, an antiseizure medicine. I took everything."

On the seventh of her eight dives on the second day at Barcelona, Clark was still second. She let herself think about what that meant, that she would receive a medal. Then she fell apart in the dive. She left the platform in second place and came out of the water in fifth. O'Brien told her she still had a chance. Her final dive, a backward 1-1/2 with 2-1/2 twists, felt good. She came out of the water to cheers but didn't know what they meant. O'Brien shouted to her, "Bronze!" She let the word sink in but didn't know what to say. The cameras focused on her. "Cool," she said.

"Ron thinks I should go slower, try one procedure at a time, but I'm not like that," she says. "I want to get back. I'll try anything. I'll try them all at once. I'm giving this the best shot, as far as it goes."

The schedule ahead is sketchy. She is missing one pre-Olympic competition after another. The Pan Ams are gone. The nationals start Aug. 9, the World Cup a month later. The absolute cutoff date is June 19, 1996, the day of the U.S.Olympic Trials, but realistically she would have to practice for at least a month before that. A ninth dive has been added to the women's competition for these Olympics, and she would need time to learn it.

Clark tries intermittently to dive, waiting a week, two weeks, then one or two more between each attempt. She has failed them all. O'Brien has talked to various coaches and learned about three lower-level divers who were troubled by the same phenomenon. None of those divers was able to return to the sport. The most notable athlete to be affected by vertigo was baseball player Nick Esasky, in 1990. He also never returned to previous form. "Everyone mentions Nick to me," Clark says. "I would like to talk with him."

She also hears a lot about the Alfred Hitchcock movie Vertigo but has never seen it. She has to explain to people that her illness is not a fear of heights but dizziness. She finds that most people don't know how to approach her. Should they be sad? Should they laugh a little? What? She doesn't know. She has been both sad and upbeat during these six months.

"I'm a realist," Clark says about her future. "I have some perspective. There are a lot of people looking for solutions to problems a lot worse than mine. I'm fine. I'm not walking off-balance. I'm healthy. I see this as a test: Attention--this is only a test. I don't know what it means, but I'm going to find out."

What else can she do? It is worth it to find out if it was worth it. She knows that already.