Although Dumais has yet to compete in his first Olympics, he just missed out on making the 2000 Olympic Team with a fifth-place finish at the Olympic Trials and served as an alternate in Sydney. He has decided to continue training and dedicating himself to the sport in hopes of making the 2004 Team and competing in Athens. In the meantime, Dumais will graduate and begin a career as a pilot, which he has already started by obtaining his private license just over a year ago. Dumais took time to answer a few questions, talking about why he almost decided to quit diving this year to his thoughts on why he’d like to compete against Olympic champion Greg Louganis.

Q1:How are you feeling about the way things have gone so far this year?

JUSTIN DUMAIS: Well, I’d say it’s been a fairly decent year. This has definitely been one of the more difficult of my career. Not so much diving-wise. I really have had no break. I’m ready to graduate. I went from senior Nationals to the University Games to Goodwill Games, came back a month late for school and basically got screwed. I was forced to take five classes because I was an hour short of being 75 percent done with my degree, which I needed to be eligible in the spring. There were no hour classes that I could take that would count towards my degree, so I got stuck taking five major business classes—something that nobody at the UT business school does, period. Let alone trying to do it a month late and being an athlete on top of it. So, I was pretty much sleeping 2 or 3 hours a night. The first couple weeks of spring semester, I was so depressed. I literally contemplated quitting diving like five or six times this semester, especially with the whole stress fracture thing. It’s been interesting. I was pretty much running on all heart this semester.

Q2:When do you graduate and what are your plans after that?

JUSTIN DUMAIS:I’ll graduate in December. I’m a finance major. I know exactly what I want to do, and it has nothing to do with business. Hopefully, I should be going to officer training in January with the Air National Guard. I want to go fly F-16s out in Houston. Supposedly, we’re going to ship out to the Woodlands and train there as part of the athlete development program. That’s still up in the air—nothing has been finalized by U.S. Diving. I’d be completely subsidized. I’d stick around there, train until 2004. I could do my weekend-a-month at the guard base, which is only a half-hour away. Definitely going to retire after 2004. Hopefully a pilot’s slot will have opened up at the Guard Unit and I’d be off to pilot training.

Q3:How long have you been flying planes?

JUSTIN DUMAIS:About a year and a half—something along those lines. I’ve got my private. I’ve just about got my instrument ticket as well. I haven’t been able to schedule with an examiner to go take the actual flying test because I’m never here. But, hopefully I’ll be able to get my commercial and my flight instructor ratings this summer. There’s an airport 10 minutes away from the pool in Houston I can be a flight instructor at—sit right seat and citation in a leer jet or something along those lines, waiting for the Games. That’s the tentative plan.

Q4:Does your interest in planes go back to when you were little?

JUSTIN DUMAIS:Oh yeah. We grew up at air shows. A lot of my family were military—not my nuclear family, but aunts and uncles. My uncle was the commander of the Civil Engineering Unit over at Edwards Air Force Base in California. So we’d go out to the air show every year. I knew when I was 4 what I really wanted to do. My parents were from a medical background—my dad’s a dentist and my mom got her masters in biological sciences, so I was kinda pushed along the whole “doctor route.” And I just realized two years into chemistry that’s just not what I wanted to do. I came out to Texas. At that point I hadn’t really definitively chosen what I wanted to do. It was good being the alternate in 2000, because it made me really sit down and reconsider where I was going and what I eventually want to do with my life. Flying was something I’d always wanted to do. Everybody wants to be a fighter pilot or an astronaut when they’re like 5 and there just aren’t many people that follow through. So, hopefully this will fall into place and I’ll be shooting million-dollar missiles and getting paid to do it.

Q5:Your father was an athlete. Do you feel that his career in athletics influenced you and your sibilings to pursue sports?

JUSTIN DUMAIS:Certainly indirectly. We were always outside. My mom and my dad would just throw us outside just so our mom could have some peace. We played a lot of roller hockey. We grew up with tennis. My dad was on the verge of a triple-A type of thing and he just gave it up when he went to dental school. He had other things to do. He was goalie for UCLA for ice hockey. It definitely instilled that work ethic. He was one of those guys that maybe wasn’t so naturally gifted, but more than made up for it with how hard he worked at it. That’s definitely rubbed off on me, possibly more so than Troy. His talents are just so innate that he never really had to work much until he came to college. It was just there. He’s just a natural competitor. Not quite the same story with me. Definitely talented, but not as naturally gifted as Troy was. I had to rely more on spending more hours just working harder than anybody else. It’s been interesting to see all the people who used to beat the pants off of me when I was younger and slowly but surely I’d beat them every once in a while and then more often and then all the time. Then they eventually fell by the wayside and kinda just disappeared.

Q6:What’s it like for your parents with all five kids diving nationally? Are they able to make it to your meets?

JUSTIN DUMAIS:Well, they came out to the NCAAs the last two years which was good, especially for Texas. They made it to Outdoor Nationals last summer, which was great because they got to see me win all four events—definitely one of my crowning achievements. They don’t make it to as many meets as they’d like to because they have other commitments and they still have my little sister and my little brother, so they’re going to travel around with them a little bit more now.

Q7:How does diving compare to other sports?

JUSTIN DUMAIS:It’s such a fickle discipline. You can dive amazingly one day and just terribly the next. It’s sort of like golf—it just really depends who’s “on” that day. It’s not really a game you can win. It’s just something you have to do. Once I retire, I’ll definitely miss being the top of the game at something, but I’ll miss the people more than anything else. But I can definitely think of several different ways I’d prefer to spend seven hours a day.

Q8:How does the U.S. compare to the rest of the world in diving?

JUSTIN DUMAIS:We can’t train like they do—we’re not federally subsidized, we don’t have everything we could want at our disposal. We’ve got to go to school, we have different commitments. We learn how to compete, as opposed to other countries. They learn how to practice. They almost always dive worse in meets than they do at practice. We tend to be a little older and a little bit more experienced time-wise and competition-wise. But we just don’t have the same luxuries and opportunities at our disposal. Troy and I are pretty much the top of the game here in the States. We’d be millionaires over in China. That’s their national sport.

Q9:Do people ever compare you to Greg Louganis or other great divers of the past?

JUSTIN DUMAIS:Certainly one of my frustrations is being compared to his successes, because they’re just not comparable. You can’t compare the two eras. Everyone keeps saying that the Americans have slipped and our performance just isn’t up to par to what he used to do, which is not true at all. I’d love to go compete against the guy because we’re doing dives that he would never have dreamed of. The rest of the countries have just gotten better. They have anything they can possibly want at their disposal. I’ve seen tapes from the ’82 World Championships and there’s some dives that were straight 10’s then that would not nearly be so now. To use a pilot analogy, we’re talking F-16 versus 1917 WWI airplane. Completely different stories—you just can’t compare the two.

Q10:At this point what are your future goals in diving?

JUSTIN DUMAIS:Certainly, I’d like to add a few more national titles. Definitely some World Cup and World Championship medals would be wonderful. Troy and I, we want to be Olympic champions. It might not be possible individually because the odds are so stacked against us. But, it’s definitely sweeter when you’re not expected to win.