Olympic Diving Silver Medalist Steele Johnson Retires
Olympic diver Steele Johnson, who won silver at the Rio Olympics in 2016, retired from the sport on Monday.
Johnson posted a lengthy video to social media, where he has in recent years been creating content aimed at a diving audience while continuing to compete.
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Johnson won a silver medal at the Rio Olympics, pairing with fellow Purdue Boilermaker David Boudia. It is the best medal that the Americans have ever won in that event, which was instituted for the 2000 Olympics. Boudia and Nicholas McCrory had won bronze four years prior in London. The American men didn’t qualify a platform synchro pair for the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 or the Paris Olympics in 2024.
Johnson was still on the boards as of the summer of 2024. He did not compete at Olympic Trials in Knoxville for a chance to reach the Paris Games, but he was working with stated goal of vying for the Los Angeles Games.
Johnson, 28, began diving at age seven. He suffered a traumatic head injury in 2009 when he hit the platform and fell 10 meters into the water, an injury that required hospitalization and still caused long- and short-term memory loss nearly a decade later.
The native of Carmel, Indiana, attended Purdue from 2014-18, with a redshirt ahead of the 2016 Olympics and foot injuries that kept him out of what would’ve been his fourth season in 2018-19, turning pro instead of a fifth year. He won five NCAA championships, including in 2015 becoming the first Boilermaker since Boudia in 2009 to win springboard and platform titles in the same season. The two were a synchro pairing by that point, winning bronze at the Shanghai stop on the 2014 FINA Diving World Cup.
Johnson also finished fourth in platform synchro (with Ben Bramley) and fifth on platform at the 2019 Pan American Games and eighth at the 2019 World Championships with Bramley. A recurrence of his foot injuries forced him to withdraw from Olympic Trials in 2021.
He is part of a long line of history at Purdue. He won 14 USA Diving national titles, was three times named the Big Ten Diver of the Year and was twice CSCAA’s Diver of the Year nationally, in 2015 and 2017.
Johnson’s foot injuries plagued much of his career. He won an NCAA title in 2018 on a broken foot, suffering constant stress fractures. He also transitioned later in his career to springboard, pairing with Boudia to win a national title as late as the winter of 2019.