ATHENS, Greece — Ten years ago, when she was a student at Hunter High School, Rachelle Smith took up diving when a member of the school swim team said they needed divers and she knew Rachelle was a gymnast.
Rachelle (pronounced Ra-Shell) gave it a try, and Thursday night she placed ninth in the Olympic Games.
"This experience was unbelievable," said the 26-year-old diver, whose last name is now Kunkel. "What an awesome experience to be in this field. The girls I was with in the finals, it was such an honor just to compete with them."
Kunkel was the only U.S. woman to qualify for the 12-diver finals in the 3-meter springboard category. Her teammate, Kimiko Soldati, did not make it out of the opening round of 32, when the top 18 moved on. In the semifinal round competition held Thursday morning, Kunkel finished 12th, which meant she faced an uphill battle in the evening finals with each qualifier taking her semifinal points with her.
She was in top form, though, and managed to climb three spots in the competitive field. At one point she was as high as eighth, but dropped back to ninth after the last round of dives, when Tania Cagnotto of Italy edged past her.
Jingjing Guo of China won the gold medal with 633.15 points, followed by teammate Winxia Wu (612) as the Chinese maintained their station atop world diving. Russia's Yulia Pakhalina won the bronze medal (610.62) ahead of her teammate, Vera Ilyina (589.11).
Blythe Hartley of Canada was fifth at 573 points, followed by two Australians, Loudy Tourky (566.94) and Irina Lashko (551.97) and then Cagnotto (550.38) and Kunkel (546.72). Emilie Heymans of Canada was 10th (530.73), while Ditte Kotzian of Germany, who came into the finals in third place, finished 11th at 509.52 points. Paola Espinosa of Mexico rounded out the scoring with 490.20 points.
"I'm very pleased with her performance," said Kunkel's coach, Hongping Li. "What we wanted was a very solid, consistent performance. That's what she did today."
"I'm super happy with the list (of dives) I put together," said Kunkel. "I feel like I kept my nerves deep inside. I wanted to do it the way I did in practice and have no regrets. I feel like I did that."
Her dives all had a degree of difficulty of 3.0 or 3.1. Among the other finalists, only Canada's Hartley and Russia's Pakhalina had as many difficult dives. She started strong with a forward 2 1/2 somersault with a twist on her first dive and moved up two spots into 10th place. After her second dive, a back two and a half somersault, she was also 10th, but she vaulted to eighth place with her third dive, a reverse two and a half somersault. She remained in eighth until the final dive, a forward three and a half somersault with a 3.1 degree of difficult, and although she delivered a solid dive, she slipped back to ninth.
Watching her in the stands at the Olympic Aquatic Center were her parents, Kent and Dannie Smith of West Valley City; her older sister Erica, who lives in Cottonwood Heights; her husband Jeff, and several members of Jeff's family. Also looking on was Doug Jamison, one of her early junior coaches in Salt Lake City.
"I remember the first time I saw her dive," said Jamison. "It wasn't like she was a natural-born diver, it was that she had so much raw talent. I thought, 'if she can somehow harness all that talent, she could be great.' "
Kunkel's first serious sport was gymnastics, which she began when her family moved durinig her early teens to Hawaii (she was born in Salt Lake City). After two years of gymnastics, she returned to Utah for her high school years. It was then that "a girl down the street" who Rachelle remembers only as "Gentry" talked to her about diving.
"I can't remember her last name," said Rachelle. "She moved away soon after that."
"But I just loved diving, right from the start," she said.
She loved it enough in the beginning to dive without a coach. Her mother, sensing her daughter's keen interest, eventually called the University of Utah, asking about proper coaching. A coach at the school, Mike Topham, was Rachelle's first junior coach. Soon after that, she began working with Jamison, who was also coaching at the University of Utah at the time, at his nonprofit Salt Lake Aquatics Program, or SLAP, as the divers call it.
After high school, Rachelle dove for BYU, where she was an All-American and the Mountain West Conference Diver of the Year in 2000. As a national-class club diver, she has won five national championships, including the 2001 3-meter title.
She considered leaving diving entirely three years ago when her husband was accepted to dental school at UCLA and she went to work as a nurse. But that's when Li, a two-time Olympian from China who coaches in L.A., told Kunkel he would coach her for free if she would commit to three years with his Trojan Dive Club.
"She is very dedicated, she worked very hard," said Li, who wedged in four-hour workouts five days a week with Kunkel between her 12-hour shifts three times a week as a nurse in the labor and delivery maternity unit at a downtown L.A. hospital. "To do all the training she has done, and do to what she has done in the last two days, that has taken a lot of strength."
Kunkel said she hasn't ruled out another Olympics, "but I'm not thinking about it seriously." Her husband is starting his final year of dental school this year, she said, and then they'll probably be moving. "I don't know if I'll go to Beijing," she said, "but I plan to have a baby before that time."
As for the girl who prodded her toward the diving board back when she was at Hunter High, Rachelle said she had no way of knowing if she's aware how far she's gone with the sport. "Maybe she was watching this somewhere," she said, "maybe she remembered."
E-mail: lbenson@desnews.com