Ron O’Brien, perhaps the most successful diving coach in United States history, who guided Greg Louganis to Olympic gold in two events at the Summer Games in 1984 and again in 1988, died on Nov. 19 at his home in Naples, Fla. He was 86.
His son, Tim, confirmed the death.
A champion diver at Ohio State University, O’Brien coached eight United States Olympic teams and also coached at two universities and a number of aquatic clubs. His divers won more than 300 medals at major domestic and international competitions, including 12 at the Olympics.
His most illustrious student was Louganis, a diver of almost unparalleled skill.
“I don’t think anybody in any sport is any closer to perfection than Greg is — Carl Lewis, Mary Lou Retton, I don’t care,” O’Brien told the New York Times columnist Dave Anderson in 1984. “People talk about 10s; in one meet, he had 35 or 40 of them. In his career, he’s had more than 100 of them, probably 200.”
O’Brien began coaching Louganis in 1978, two years after he won a silver medal in the 10-meter platform at the Summer Olympics in Montreal.
“I was an instrument of his creation,” Louganis said in an interview. “
He recognized that I wasn’t competitive, that I was a performer, and he devised games to challenge me and keep me engaged.”
After losing the chance to compete at the 1980 Summer Games in Moscow when the United States boycotted them over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Louganis won gold medals in the platform and three-meter springboard at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics (which the Soviet Union boycotted in retaliation) and again at the 1988 Seoul Games. He was the first male diver to win the two events in consecutive Olympics.
O’Brien was also one of the few people who knew, before the Olympics in Seoul, that Louganis had tested positive for H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS. Initially, Louganis didn’t want O’Brien to know, for fear that he would ease up on his training. But when he told O’Brien, Louganis recalled, “I broke down and he came around his desk and held me and said, ‘I don’t know what this means, but we’ll get through it together.’”
O’Brien served as a coach of the U.S. Olympic diving team from 1968 to 1996, all but one as the head coach. His other Summer Games medalists were Jennifer Chandler and Debbie Keplar Wilson (both in 1976); Michele Mitchell (1984 and 1988); Wendy Wyland (1984); Scott Donie (1992); and Mary Ellen Clark (1992 and 1996).
Clark, who won bronze medals in the 10-meter platform in both years and is now the head diving coach at Bryant University in Smithfield, R.I., said in an interview that O’Brien was “the most incredible technician” and “the GOAT of diving in the world.”
She added, “He would do one-on-one meetings to learn how to motivate people, what was inside them, how they learned, and he had the ability to tap into people’s inner talents.”
Ronald Shay O’Brien was born on March 14, 1938, in Pittsburgh. His father, Paul, was a firefighter, and his mother, Helen (Shay) O’Brien, managed the home. Ron began swimming and diving as a boy at a Y.M.C.A.
“I got into the sport and swam and dove all the way through high school,” he said when he was interviewed for an article on the United States Olympic and Paralympic Museum’s website. “And by the time I was a senior in high school, I realized that I was too little” — he stood 5-foot-5 — “to be a swimmer, so I decided to concentrate on diving.”
At Ohio State University, he was an All-American in the one- and three-meter springboard from 1957 to 1959 and also competed in gymnastics. He was the N.C.A.A. diving champion in the one-meter springboard in 1959, the year he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in physical education. That was also the subject of his master’s, which he received in 1961, and his Ph.D., which he earned in 1967, both from Ohio State.
His profound disappointment at finishing third in the U.S. Olympic diving trials in 1960 — one place away from qualifying for the Rome Olympics — “lit a fire in me to become the best diving coach I could be,” he said in 2019 at his induction into the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Hall of Fame.
He soon fulfilled that promise. From 1962 to 1996, he was the head diving coach at the University of Minnesota; Ohio State; Mission Viejo Nadadores, a swimming and diving club in Mission Viejo, Calif.; and the International Swimming Hall of Fame aquatic complex (now the Fort Lauderdale Aquatic Center) in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
Among his accomplishments over that period was coaching a national diving champion for 24 consecutive years and seeing divers he trained sweep all four gold medals at the 1982 world championships in Ecuador: Wyland, Megan Neyer and Louganis, who captured two of the medals.
O’Brien was inducted into the Ohio State University Athletics Hall of Fame in 1984 and the International Swimming Hall of Fame in 1988.
He also held positions at USA Diving, the sport’s governing body, including high performance director, and owned and ran Divers to College, a website that lets high school divers make themselves known to college coaches.
In addition to his son, a coach on the 2000 U.S. Olympic diving team, he is survived by his wife, Mary Jane (Tolerton) O’Brien; his daughter, Anne Hays; four grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.
Mary Ellen Clark recalled advice she received from O’Brien, who became her coach in 1990, before she finished 10th at the following year’s Pan American Games in Havana.
“I talked to Ron and I said, ‘I don’t know if it’s worth it to keep training for another year only to be disappointed,’” she said. “He said, ‘You owe it to yourself to find out. What else are you going to do in the next year that would have that kind of impact?’”
He promised to train her differently — and as a result, she won her first Olympic bronze medal in 1992 in Barcelona. Four years later, she won her second bronze.
“I was his last Olympic medalist,” she said, “and that was cool.”
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