Lashko gave Australia their first diving world champion

Sydney: Irina Lashko has managed to fit a few more twists into her life than most athletes.

One of the world’s finest female divers for the past 16 years, Lashko started out as a child prodigy who won 12 national titles in her native Russia and competed at three Olympics, the first at Seoul in 1988 when she was just 15.

She is now 31 and preparing for her fourth Games, but her life could not be more different. A suburban housewife with a 10-year-old daughter, she competes in the green and gold of her adopted country Australia.

“I didn’t plan things this way, it’s just the way it turned out,” Lashko said in an interview. “I started off in trampolining but my coach told me to switch to diving because it was in the Olympics. I was only six and didn’t even know what the Olympics were.

“I thought he was crazy but here I am all these years later.”

Lashko is the latest in a long queue of former Eastern bloc athletes to pledge their allegiance to Australia.

While many were drawn for financial reasons, Lashko quite literally came from Russia with love.

Just over a decade ago, while competing in Australia, she was introduced through mutual friends to Melbourne businessman Carol Furzer and the pair fell for each other.

They had a daughter but decided to live apart while Lashko pursued her sporting career. Long-distance relationships are testing enough and theirs was especially difficult.

“I could hardly speak English and he didn’t speak Russian. We’d try and talk on the telephone but it took so long just to say anything,” she said.

In 1998, after she won gold at the world championships in Perth, Lashko took the plunge. She left her home and family in the Ural Mountains to marry Furzer and relocate to Australia.

“Russia is always a part of me but I feel like an Aussie now. I came from somewhere else but so did just about everyone else in this country,” she said.

Lashko’s decision to switch nationalities came at a high price. She had finished fourth, competing for the Soviet Union, in the three-metre springboard at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, then won silver medals at Barcelona (1992) for the Unified Team and Atlanta (1996) for Russia.

She took out Australian citizenship in 1999 in the hope of competing for her adopted country at the Sydney 2000 Games but was thwarted when the Russian Olympic Federation did not give her clearance. “That was probably the worst time of my life. I just cried the whole time and I couldn’t bring myself to watch the Olympics,” she said.

“I just decided I wasn’t going to dive ever again but my husband convinced me to give it one more go.”

Lashko’s leap of faith quickly bore fruit. She won a silver medal at the 2001 World Championships in Fukuoka then two golds at the Commonwealth Games in Manchester in 2002.

Last year, she gave Australia their first diving world champion when she won the one-metre springboard in Barcelona. Because the one-metre is not an Olympic event, Lashko’s hopes of striking gold in Athens lie at the end of a three-metre springboard.

She has qualified as one of two Australians in the individual event. She will also dive in the three-metre synchronised after teaming up with Chantelle Michell to win the Olympic trials after just two training sessions together.

“This is my last Olympics so I want to make it my best,” she said.