Dumais, Loukas earn berths

INDIANAPOLIS | Troy Dumais made it 3 for three.

Dumais earned his third trip to the Olympics with a dominating performance in the 3-meter springboard at the U.S. trials Saturday, but he had barely crawled from the water when his focus shifted to the ultimate goal - winning a gold medal in Beijing against the powerful Chinese team.

“I’m going to get back in the weight room on Monday morning,” said Dumais, a 28-year-old native of Ventura, Calif. “The flame is burning as bright as ever.”

Christina Loukas locked up her first trip to the Olympics with an easy win in the women’s 3-meter, though the enormity of it all was a bit overwhelming.

“It’s not really hit me yet,” said Loukas, a 22-year-old from Riverwoods, Ill.

Dumais earned a couple of perfect 10s for his second dive, overcame a bit of a wobble on his next-to-last attempt and blew away the 12-diver field with a total of 1552.90 over three rounds.

“I wanted to treat this like the Olympics,” he said. “I’m not going to be 90-something points ahead of the Chinese going to the last round.”

Dumais finished sixth on springboard at the last two Olympics in Sydney and Athens - totally unacceptable for someone who grew up worshipping one of the greatest divers in Olympic history.

“When I was a little kid watching Greg Louganis win all those medals, I got the idea in my head that I wanted to win more than him,” Dumais said. “That may not be realistic, but it stuck with me.”

James, Wade have quest

AKRON, Ohio | LeBron James and Dwyane Wade cruised city streets on bicycles Saturday for charity.

Soon, the NBA superstars will be touring China for gold.

James and Wade have been selected to play on the U.S. Olympic basketball team, which will be formally introduced Monday by coach Mike Krzyzewski and USA Basketball managing director Jerry Colangelo. The 12-man squad, which will also include NBA MVP Kobe Bryant, Jason Kidd and Carmelo Anthony, will try to win a gold medal that has eluded the Americans since 1996.

This will be the second Olympics for Cleveland’s James and Miami’s Wade, who were on the American team that finished a disappointing third and won a bronze medal at the Athens Games in 2004.

“It’s easy to focus on USA Basketball right now,” James said. “We have one goal, and that’s to win a gold medal. We’re very excited about it. We don’t worry about the rest. We worry about getting in shape and getting ready to win a gold medal, that’s our only concern.”

Torch tours Tibet

LHASA, China | Hundreds of police and paramilitary troops stood watch and hand-picked onlookers cheered as the Olympic torch passed through the Tibetan capital, the scene of bloody anti-government riots three months earlier.

No disruptions were reported, although the mood overall was far more subdued than at the torch’s earlier stops in cities in China proper.

The torch next travels to neighboring Qinghai province, also hit this spring by protests in Tibetan-dominated areas, before gradually winding its way across northern China toward Beijing on Aug. 8. The Tibetan leg was cut from three days to one, ostensibly to make way for an Aug. 3-5 visit to Sichuan province, the center of a May 12 earthquake that killed nearly 70,000 people.

Lhasa, which has been under a security lockdown since the March riots, all but closed down for the relay, with streets deserted and shops closed.