TOKYO - When Jerry Windle watches his son Jordan Windle, a US Olympic diver, compete in the Tokyo Olympics, he says he will be thinking about the incredible journey it took to get there.
Jerry adopted Jordan, now 22, from Cambodia when he was just 18 months old.
"From a very young age, I always knew I wanted to be a dad," Windle says. "That was something just innately part of who I was."
Jerry is also gay, which at the time, two decades ago, he thought would prevent him from ever fulfilling his dream of fatherhood.
That changed when Jerry, after the death of his mother, switched careers and moved from California to Florida when he was in his mid-30s.
"I called the agency [named in the article] and just said, 'Is it possible for a single person to adopt?' and they said, 'Yes,'" Windle recalled. "I got a packet of information and an application about a week later and I took probably three days and filled out every single document, got fingerprinted, filled out my background information, I did everything."
Shortly after applying for adoption, Jerry said he learned about a boy in Cambodia who was in an orphanage and available for adoption. When the adoption agency sent a photo of the boy, at the time named Pisey - Cambodian for "little darling" - Windle said he knew he was looking at his son.
"It was done the second I opened the envelope and saw that photograph," he said. "I sent a photo of me and asked them to give it to him in a necklace and explain to him that I was his daddy and was going to be coming to get him."
Jerry brought his son, whom he named Jordan, home to the United States in June 2000, five months after he began the adoption process.
Jerry raised Jordan in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, which is where the future Olympian was discovered, by chance, at age 7 at an aquatics summer camp that Jerry remembers signing him up for at the last minute.
"They let them jump off the diving board one day and when I dropped him off again, the guy who was running the camp asked if he could talk to me," said Jerry. "He said, 'You need to get this child into diving. ... He will be a national champion one day. He may even be an Olympian one day.'"
The man who told Windle his son could be an Olympic diver was Tim O'Brien, whose father, Dr. Ron O'Brien, was a longtime Olympic diving coach and coach of four-time Olympic gold medalist Greg Louganis.
"I put him in diving and before the year was out, he was doing insane dives," said Windle. "The next year, Jordan won the junior national championship."
The family later moved to Indianapolis and North Carolina so that Jordan could continue his diving career.
In North Carolina, Jordan was coached by Nunzio Esposto, the head diving coach at Duke University.
While Jerry supported his son's love of diving, he also supported his son's roots, teaching him about Cambodia and its people and culture.
When Jordan was 16, the Windles returned to Cambodia for the first time since his adoption. Jordan competed in a diving exhibition there and was greeted like a rock star, with people yelling his Cambodian name Pisey, according to Jerry.
"People in Cambodia really believe that Jordan was meant to bring light," he said, adding that Jordan recently got the Cambodian flag tattooed on his arm in a spot where people can see it when he dives.
After narrowly missing earning spots on the US Olympic Diving Team in the two previous Olympic trials, Jordan, a senior at the University of Texas, placed second in the 10-metre platform at the Olympic trials in June.
The Tokyo Olympics will be one of Jordan's few diving competitions that Jerry has ever missed in-person due to COVID-19 restrictions.
"His intention is to go out there and give it all that he's got and I couldn't ask for anything more than that," said Jerry. "I can't wait to watch the rest of his story unfold because I know it's just beginning." - Agencies. August 6, 2021
