Penfield's Wendy Wyland won a bronze at Olympics. But her life was tragically short
It was clear from an early age that Wendy Wyland had remarkable talent. Legendary Penfield coach Betty Perkins-Carpenter remarked, "she was doing dives that senior divers weren't doing yet when she was just 12."
Wyland won her first national diving championship at age 16 and claimed the world championship a year later. She excelled at both the 3-meter springboard and the higher, more challenging 10-meter platform. She won medals in both events at the Pan American Games in 1983. By then, Wyland had moved to Mission Viejo, California, to work with other Olympic hopefuls.
She won a bronze medal in the 10-meter event at the 1984 Olympics and drew worldwide attention. Wyland was included in People magazine's "50 most beautiful people," which declared "if cuteness has a name, it must be Wendy Wyland."
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She retired from competitive diving and returned to Rochester in the early 1990s, where she married David VanDerWoude. She ran the Webster Aquatic Center and was the swimming and diving coach at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
Wyland died unexpectedly in 2003 at the age of 38. At the time, her father said she had been suffering from migraine headaches for about 22 months. The day she died, she went home sick from work and went to bed, and her husband was unable to revive her, her father said. Despite an autopsy, the exact cause of her death never was clear.
"It was pretty significant for us to have someone of Wendy's caliber both as a competitor and, more importantly, as a human being," RIT's director of human performance, Lou Spiotti, told the Democrat and Chronicle after VanDerWoude died. "She had a magnetic personality and people at RIT here just embraced her so quickly. She was a champion and she carried herself like one."
Each week, we recognize a great sports figure from the Rochester area.
This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: Wendy Wyland was Penfield Olympian who died young from mystery illness
