UH Diving Trio Gearing Up for the 2004 Summer Olympic Games

Yulia Pakhalina

The University of Houston diving program will be well represented during the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens in August. Former NCAA individual national champion Yulia Pakhalina, current administrative assistant Vera Ilyina and diving head coach Jane Figueiredo will compete as part of the Russian diving team.

Pakhalina and Ilyina look to defend their Olympic gold medals when they take part in the 3-meter springboard synchronized diving event on Aug. 14. That event begins at 1 p.m. (CDT) (9 p.m. in Athens), Aug. 14 and is slated to last about an hour.

The Cougar duo captured the gold medal in the 2000 Olympics at Sydney after working together for only 10 months.

While they will be teammates in the synchronized diving, the two Cougars will go head-to-head in the 3-meter springboard event starting with the preliminaries on Aug. 25. The preliminaries are slated to begin at 5:30 a.m. (CDT) (1:30 p.m. in Athens).

The 3-meter diving semifinals will begin at 3 a.m. (CDT) (noon in Athens) on Aug. 26 with the finals slated to start at 1 p.m. (CDT) (9 p.m. in Athens).

Pakhalina established herself as one of the finest divers in school history from 2001-03. With five individual national championships, she set a school record and swept the 1-meter and 3-meter diving events at each of the first two C-USA meets.

She was an 11-time C-USA Diver of the Week honoree and received the 2002-03 C-USA Women's Swimming and Diving Scholar-Athlete Award for her exemplary work in the classroom.

This will be the second Olympic Games in which Pakhalina has competed.

One of the world's finest diving coaches, Figueiredo enters her 15th season at the helm of the Cougar Diving program in 2004-05. A two-time NCAA and three-time C-USA Diving Coach of the Year, Figueiredo has led divers to the NCAA Championships 16 times during her illustrious career.

The Zimbabwe native will be working in her fourth Olympic Games after serving as a coach for Pakhalina and Ilyina in 1996 and working with the Great Britain team in 1996. She also competed for Portugal during the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

Ilyina begins her second season as the Cougar Swimming and Diving administrative assistant in 2004-05 after an award-winning career at the University of Texas.

This will be the fourth Olympic Games in which she has competed.