The ’84 Summer Olympics have become legendary. Known as the first year China was allowed to compete, their inclusion brought a whole new set of challenges to the U.S. team. Diving is a small community, where everyone knows the bid’ness of everyone else. Sex scandals, stolen routines, and backstabbing were common, even expected. Standing apart from the fray, though, the secretive, red-headed Rhonda Rwanda had been a powerhouse in previous years.

Her star had begun to fade eight years before at the 1976 Olympics. A stumble at the end of the platform had cost her a place on the podium, and Betsy Banger had gotten her second gold in the Women’s 10m Springboard event. Since then Rhonda had gone on a pilgrimage to Mecca, returning with a bad attitude and hair bleached blonde from the Middle Eastern sun. She started training immediately, going into seclusion and refusing to speak to the press. Rumors floated around that she could no longer speak, she was pregnant with the seed of Apollo, and she was on the run from the Dutch government, although they’re generally too high to care about fugitives.

Rhonda ignored all the talk, daily exposing her body to asbestos and eight hour diving marathons. Her manager and lover, Clyde “The Glide” Wexter was the only person she would allow to see her practices. Word began to spread that her retirement from diving was imminent. Clyde confirmed that she would compete in the 1984 Summer Olympics, and would walk away from all the glory of the diving world after winning gold. After her shoddy performances in her past two attempts, the world was ablaze with speculation. Could the aging Rwanda, now 46, pull off the biggest upset in Olympics history (if you disregard all the other upsets in Olympic history)?

Judgment day came, and after the semifinals, two women remained in contention for the gold. Rhonda and her rival Betsy stared at each other across the pool, admiring the curves of each others’ bodies in the skintight suits. Betsy’s final dive was nearly perfect, although no one in the crowd could tell the difference from the previous 84 dives. Rhonda had to achieve perfection in her last dive to win.

Slowly, she walked down the board towards the water. As she lowered herself down, the crowd gasped in amazement at her athleticism. She balanced precariously on her single point of contact, a 2 inch section of her forehead. Could it be?! Rhonda was attempting the Whizz Banger! A dive commonly regarded as impossible that killed literally pairs of children each decade, as they attempted to prove its doability. Despite all the anticipation, the crowd fell silent.

Rhonda took to the sky, leaping from her forehead to spin 13 times, rotating 1080° around her axis, and blew a kiss to the judges, landing gracefully in the water, without disturbing the surface. The stunned silence erupted into a deafening cry of amazement. The slow clap was started by none other than Betsy Banger, wide eyed in admiration. The judges combined their scorecards to make the number 10,000. For the first time in history, Olympic diving was exciting!

The picture above was taken 0.64 milliseconds before Rhonda takes to the sky, imprinting her legacy on the world. She later moved in with Betsy Banger and they had one child, naming him Michael Phelps after some guy that they knew, whose name was Chuck Brown.