Fu Mingxia

Fu Mingxia (born August 16, 1978, in Wuhan, Hubei) is a retired Chinese diver, multiple Olympic gold medalist and world champion.

She is also famous for being one of the youngest Olympic diving champions, having earned a gold at the 1992 Barcelona Games when she was just 13 years and 345 days old.

During the 2000 Sydney Olympics, Fu won her fourth gold medal, joining Americans Pat McCormick and Greg Louganis as the world's only quadruple Olympic-diving champions.

Fu Mingxia was born into a working-class family in the city of Wuhan, located along the Yangtze River in central China.

In 1990, Fu made her international diving debut, capturing a gold at the U.S. Open and also at the Goodwill Games, held that summer in Seattle.

The competition was intense, and Fu found herself in eighth place in the final round because she had failed a compulsory dive.

Fu pulled herself together, however, and ended up with the title, beating out the Soviet Union's World Cup winner Yelena Miroshina by nearly 25 points.

Fu's coaches drilled her hard, but she said she found comfort and peace from the physically and mentally straining regimen through music.

Shortly after Atlanta, the triple-gold-medallist decided to retire and enrolled at Beijing's Tsinghua University to study management science.

As a member of the university team, Fu competed in the 1999 Universiade in Palma, Spain, winning both the highboard and springboard titles.

She won a gold, nailing her final dive, a reverse one-and-a-half somersault, two-and-a-half twist for nines when eights would have been enough to beat out Guo, her teammate.