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Lyle Yost’s journey towards the 2024 Summer Olympics and beyond
Lyle Yost is aiming to compete in the 2024 Summer Olympics. (Credit: Nikos Frazier / Journal & Courier / USA TODAY NETWORK)

Lyle Yost’s journey towards the 2024 Summer Olympics and beyond

COLUMBUS, Ohio (BVM) — Before Lyle Yost was a junior national champion diver and a collegiate star with Olympic hopes, he was a second grader in Shaker Heights that liked imitating parkour videos from YouTube on the playground. His mother, afraid of what her son might do to himself while trying various dangerous tricks, decided to use water as a safety net.

“We found a Shaker student who was a lifeguard and on the diving team that gave me a couple of lessons at Thornton Park,” Yost said. “… She pointed me towards a diving club in the area to go and check out. That’s when I got started with American Flyers Diving, and I stayed with them from the time that I was eight until the time that I was 18 and leaving for college.”

Yost had many of the traits that would make a great diver from a young age like athleticism, power, and explosive ability, but he was not a natural. It was difficult for him to get used to the high drops off of the diving board, the required time commitment, and the potential of a poor landing. 

“[Early on], I was kind of just showing up and going through the motions… at that point, very candidly, I was not very good at diving,” Yost said. “I was all over the place, I was a headcase and a lot of stuff would freak me out.”

Things began to change when he surprised himself with a qualification for his first junior nationals at age 10. While he was not yet at the level of other divers at the competition, a talk from his coach with American Flyers Diving, Marc Cahalane, changed his outlook towards diving.

“My coach explained to me that, ‘Listen, you can be as good as any of these guys that are here…you’ve got the talent,’” Yost said. “The way I moved, the way I hit the water, there were just a couple of intangibles that I was fundamentally pretty good at, aside from if I could learn how to not freak out when I’m learning how to do a new dive.”                                                

Yost’s training ramped up to two or three hours every day, six days a week. To start his freshman year of high school, he had a couple of notable breakthroughs. He performed extremely well at the 2015 Junior Nationals in the United States qualifying him for the Junior Panamerican Games in Cuba. The experience made him begin to realize where his hard work in training could get him.

“I knew then that I had the potential to get to these meets, to belong at these meets, and to do really well at this level,” Yost said. “That’s kind of when I put my nose to the grindstone and I started working towards it as my full time thing.”

Being around so many divers from all around the world also developed his lasting passion for learning and communicating in new languages. 

“There were eleven countries at the PanAm championships,” Yost explained. “I could talk to Canadians, and I made a couple of friends from Colombia that let me stutter along with them, because my Spanish wasn’t very good at that point. That’s when I really developed a passion for languages and just being able to communicate with and meet new people and have new experiences.”

Yost finished high school as the No.1-diving recruit in the United States for his class, a three-time junior national champion, and a three-time Ohio state champion. In three years diving for Ohio State, one of more than 60 different colleges that actively recruited him, Yost has been an All-American each season. He also participated in the 2021 U.S. Olympic Trials in Indianapolis.

“I was struggling with a couple of things in the training leading up to it, but I got in that meet and I made all of the adjustments that I was focused on,” Yost said. “…Changing something is obviously going to have an effect on some other part of the dive. I finally had a good takeoff on my reverse three-and-a-half, and I had been really struggling with that dive.

“I wasn’t used to being as high up in the air when I came out of that dive… so I flew over, went past vertical, and it wasn’t a high scoring dive at all. But, I learned a lot from the experience of being in that contest, and making those changes in a high pressure situation. Looking around at all of the other divers after I finished my competition, I wasn’t discouraged at all. I thought, I’m absolutely positive that I have the talent and I have the skills and the work ethic to hang with anyone out here on this pool deck. Being there and seeing that really pumped me up actually, and it gave me a lot of confidence knowing that when I’m back here in 2024, I’ll be ready.”

Yost has two years left of collegiate eligibility, and in that time, he plans to get his Master’s degree in Education, allowing him to teach Spanish in high school once his diving career is over. He is currently fluent in Spanish while learning French and Portuguese. This summer, instead of preparing for upcoming meets where he must have a set of dives that he can nail on the first try, Yost decided to ramp up his training to a new level. He focused on dives that will allow him to get to the next level before the upcoming college season, and eventually the 2024 Summer Olympics. 

“This summer, I had an opportunity as I had qualified for the world university games in Chengdu [and] I ended up declining that spot because I really wanted to spend this summer just training,” Yost said. “…Now is the time for me to be learning new dives, to be taking up the big dives that I’m going to eventually need further down the road, which is what I’ve been working on for the last couple of months, and it’s really paying off.”

As he focuses on the Olympics, Yost still has goals he’d like to hit at the collegiate level like having the highest degree-difficulty on the 1-meter dive and perfecting his training regimen. As he awaits the upcoming season, he is eyeing the Big Ten tournament and NCAA championships in February and March.

Yost plans to train to be an Olympic diver at least for 2024 and 2028, and potentially through 2032. With all of the incremental progress and success that Yost has achieved through hard work, it would be difficult to bet against him.