Simon Barnes

From Simon Barnes in Sydney

She’s Steve Redgrave’s soul-sister. She’s 5ft 3in, 7st 10lb, and only 21, but Redgrave would recognise the mind. Pure diamond. It’s the hardness I am thinking off, not the sparkle.

Fu Mingxia. You’ll be familiar with her, if not by name. She was the little waif of Barcelona - the image of the great Games in that city of fantasy. There she was on the top of the 10m diving platform with the great cityscape spread out behind her. And she but 13 years of age.

China's Fu Mingxia wins gold in the women's 3m springboard diving competition © AP

She won gold in those Games, showing a sternness older than her years and an innocence rather younger. And as you watched the perfectly controlled tumbles, the perfect command of space, the perfect control of mind, you warmed to her with the utmost admiration.

And yet that admiration was always cut with something else, and that something else was pity, it mixed in with the admiration like a couple of ice cubes in an octuple whisky.

She went to the Atlanta Olympics four years older and a couple of stone heavier. Now she could make that springboard ping. And she won her second Olympic gold on the platform that year, and then picked up her third in the springboard.

I was there for that one, and must tell once again the words that defined her, it seemed, for all time. What exercise do you like least, Miss Fu? Bear in mind that vast amounts of a diver’s work is on dry land, as it is with an oarsman such as Redgrave. Instead of weights and the ergometer, with divers it is flexibility exercises. If you can’t spend hours at a time with your face on your knees, you are not a diver.

And Fu turned to her questioner and gave him a blow-torch stare. "The only exercise I don’t like is one I can’t do."

She is, of course, a product of the troubling Chinese hot-house system: taken away from her parents, and subjected to long and hard discipline. And unsurprisingly, after Atlanta and discovering a mind of her own, she walked away from it all. She had brought her state enough glory, after all.

She went to Qinghua University in Beijing and studied economics; grew out her standard-issue Chinese bob; did things like listen to pop music. For the first time in her life, she was young. I don’t know if she said that anybody who saw her on a diving platform had full permission to shoot her, but that was the general idea.

And like Redgrave, Fu found she didn’t want to give it up after all. “I still think diving is very charming,” she said. "I like it very much, that’s why I came back. I get a lot from it."

She was not selected for the platform this time, but she won silver as half of a pair in the women’s synchronised diving, a new sport at these games which is, well, charming, and a great asset to the Games.

But she, like Redgrave, was on a quest. And that quest required a gold medal. Were she to win one, she would match the achievements of Americans Pat McCormick and Greg Louganis, the only other divers in history to have won four Olympic golds. McCormick won the women’s highboard and springboard in 1952 and 1956 and gay icon Louganis won the men’s highboard and springboard in 1984 and 1988, plus a highboard silver in 1976.

Fu came into the women's 3m springboard final today in second place after the semi-finals, behind her 18-year-old compatriot Guo Jingjing. It was always going to be a straight fight between them for the gold.

Control of airspace. That means performing the perfect tumble and then pulling out of it in time to control the entry. Like the landing in gymnastics, the entry is the measure of control.

Guo fell short in the fourth dive and, for the first time in the night, Fu was in the lead. Guo made her final dive in the knowledge that she needed something close to perfection, and the wish got in the way of the deed.

Fu still needed a very good dive, and she won it like a champion - a reverse 1½ somersaults piked with 2½ twists - a dive she chose last because it one is which she has absolute confidence, justified confidence.

She absolutely ripped the entry and emerged from the water the greatest female diver the world has ever seen. "I don’t regard myself as special,” she said afterwards. “I am the equal of all the others in the team."

She spent two years away from the sport and put on a fair amount of weight. A chance remark - some one asked if she could still dive - shamed her into getting back in shape. And six months on, slim and trim, she thought: Well, why not dive again? And it was for herself this time, for the love of the sport, for the love of the stalking and capture of victory. "I was," she said, "very fond of diving."

And what was next? "Before today, I have never thought of my future. I think now I may go back to university." And what about the Games in Athens in four years' time - the lure of a fifth gold? I believe I’ve heard that one before at these Games. But that’s only for the rare ones. The diamonds.