At the 1964 Olympics, Steve the-lightning-bolt Lozinsky invented the triple somersault with a tuck and roll between the first and second and the second and third turns. Even before he hit the pool in perfect perpendicular all the judges but the Russian were preparing to show ten. A naturalised American, Steve was born in the USSR. Celebrating his gold, he spent several drunken nights with the Polish women's 400-metre relay team, causing teenage wife Sophie to return to her parents with baby Boris.

Lozinsky missed the 68 Olympics having damaged his back practising a sequence his trainer described as 'sheer folly'. But the long hospitalisation brought about a reconciliation with Sophie and their daughter Natasha was born in 1970. The little girl was thus present at the pool in Munich in 1972 when Lozinsky took gold again with the simply astonishing corkscrewed backward somersault and double sideways roll. Everybody remarked on the apparent impossibility of the diver's body straightening up before hitting the water. Nine-year-old Boris plunged his head in his mother's breasts and refused to watch. An excellent violinist, the boy had never learned to swim. 'Diving is about getting the most out of that very short space of time we all have before gravity catches up with us," Lozinsky told the press, before himself setting off to catch up with Bavaria's bars and brothels. With her parents in a rest home, Sophie turned a blind eye. Boris's schooling did not come cheap.

After the motorbike accident and ankle amputation that put an end to his career in the pool, Lozinsky took up white-water kayaking. His one regret was that he could never get Boris to join him on his descents of the Rockies’ most challenging creeks. Daughter Natasha's bronze at the cross country ski-ing championships in 1992 left him unimpressed, perhaps because it coincided with the divorce that saw Lozinsky leave Sophie for a would-be Japanese model.

Fortunately, there was Boris at home to keep his mother company. In his thirties now, he was struggling to get his music performed: it's rather more difficult, he would point out, to get people to understand a musical score than a triple forward somersault. Sophie said she thanked God every day that her boy had found a steady job at the bank. When father and son met, Lozinsky demanded to know why on earth his son wasn't playing the stock market. In 1999 the ex-athlete made a fortune on the NASDAQ only to lose everything two years later. He declared bankruptcy, sold his house and moved into a bed-sit in the Bronx. To everybody's surprise, the Japanese girl stayed.

In late January 2004, Boris left the bank half an hour early, took the subway up to the Washington Bridge, set out to walk across it, but, before even reaching the river, jumped over the parapet onto the rocks sixty metres below. Heartbroken, Lozinsky could never understand why his son hadn't walked just that little bit further, 'so at least he could have dived into water.'

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