Winterbottom is back on top

“I am so proud. I can’t even begin to tell you how proud I am,” Winterbottom said. “I had hip replacement surgery six months before [the competition].

“I cried after I won the bronze medal. … When I booked the trip, I wasn’t sure if everything was going to work.”

Winterbottom, a physical education teacher at Borel Middle School and a diving coach at Highlands Recreation Center in San Mateo, has been diving for 40 years. She was a Connecticut state champion in high school and earned a scholarship to Florida State before quitting the sport because of burn-out.

She returned to the sport about 10 years later, rediscovered her passion and has been diving ever since.

In addition to the individual bronze in the 55-59 age bracket in Budapest, Winterbottom teamed with longtime friend Carla Helder to win gold in the 3-meter synchronized diving competition.

“We have been best friends for 20 years, but we had never synchroed together. We practiced maybe four times,” Winterbottom said. “We just got our timing down on dry land. … We pulled it out by two points. We beat the Brits.”

A bright, vivacious and gregarious person, Winterbottom’s always-cheery disposition took a hit the last couple of years as her left hip continued to give her trouble. She learned to compensate for the injury, going so far as to change the foot she led with on her walkup to her dives — imagine a hurdler suddenly change the leg they led with over the hurdle. When a cortisone shot into the joint relieved the pain for only a couple of weeks, surgery was the next choice.

It wasn’t the only option — but it was the one that best afforded Winterbottom the opportunity to return to diving.

“I’ve never been so scared of anything in my life,” Winterbottom said at the prospects of having a body part replaced. “But my doctor, Dr. Daniel Holtzman, said to me, ‘Do you want to be in pain the rest of your life? Do you want to be in physical therapy for the rest of your life? Or do you want to get back to diving?”

She had a simple answer. She had the surgery in January with her eye on the world championships at the end of July.

Then she had to wait.

“I was about two months away from training. I had to wait about two months for the scar to heal. The doctor said wait two months before you start jumping,” Winterbottom said.

Winterbottom followed doctor’s orders, for the most part. After two months, she started working on her line-ups — simply falling off the board and trying to enter the water a smoothly as possible, which is one of the judged criteria in diving.

She felt good enough to make a trip to Cleveland for the national championships and Winterbottom had every intention of simply going as a spectator.

“I still hadn’t pushed off the new hip yet,” Winterbottom said. “I switched hurdle legs. I had learned to do it the previous year. I just winged a [dive] list at nationals in May.

“Surgery in January. Meet in May.”

Winterbottom survived the competition and a month later was feeling even better when she strained her Achilles tendon while attending a wedding reception in June.

That forced her to shut down her training once again — now about six weeks before the beginning of worlds.

But she had signed up for the competition and had already made travel arrangements. Winterbottom figured, at the very least, she could grit her way through the event. She was still experiencing pain in the hip, but it had gotten better with her latest rest and recovery period.

“Budapest was my goal, but I wasn’t sure there would be enough time,” Winterbottom said. “I worked hard at the physical therapy [appointments] and exercises.

“I wasn’t sure if everything was going to click. I was trying to push off my new hip, but things weren’t quite working the way I wanted them to.”

But the time she got to Hungary, however, her hip was feeling as good as it had in years.

“By the time I got there, I wasn’t feeling [pain]. I was jumping higher than I had in two years,” Winterbottom said.

While the pain in her hip had subsided on her jumps, it still bothered her doing certain, more complex maneuvers that involved spins and somersaults.

“The strategy at worlds was to do clean, simple dives,” Winterbottom said. “I didn’t want to do a lot of somersaults because my hip was still hurting coming out of dives.”

Some how, some way, Winterbottom put everything together and earned two more medals to add to her collection.

And she can’t wait to win more. Now that her hip is finally starting to round into shape, Winterbottom anticipates ramping up her training and getting back to the level where she was before her hip started to take its toll.

“The next (world championships) are in Korea in two years. We’re already making plans,” Winterbottom said. “With my new hip, I can’t wait to get my real [dive] list back. I want my front, two-and-half back. I want all my hard dives back.

“Watch out world!”

Nathan Mollat can be reached by email: nathan@smdailyjournal.com or by phone: 344-5200 ext. 117. He can also be followed on Twitter @CheckkThissOutt.