Olmps

DIVING

29 July–11 August 2012

AqUATIC Centre, Olympic Park

Athletes: 136 | Golds up for grabs: 8

Olympic presence

Men, 1904–present; women, 1912–present

Olympic Format

Men and women compete in spring board and plat-

form events, in both individual and synchronised competitions..

Contenders:

Only an Australian victory in the men’s springboard

prevented Chinese divers from capturing every gold medal at Beijing 2008. . Expect more of the same. . British hopes are on Tom Daly, who won the 10m competition at the 2010 World Championships and keeps improving..

Past Champions:

USA: 48 | China: 27 | Sweden: 16

Why Watch Diving?

Of all the sports she could have chosen for the

climactic final sequence of Olimpia, Leni Riefenstahl chose diving.. In the most controversial and innovative of all Olympic films, Riefenstahl created a series of stunning images that capture the many compelling facets of the sport: the iron nerve required to maintain poise when leaping from a platform higher than a two-storey house;

the grace and acrobatic brilliance of the diver’s flight; the sensational moment of entry and engulfment, as the body strikes the water at more than thirty miles an hour..

It hasn’t changed very much since, though new technologies create micro-ripples and bubbles to soften the water, lowering its surface tension.. Still, get it a fraction wrong and diving can hurt – or worse.. Russian diver Sergei Chalibashvili died after attempting a three-and-a-half reverse somersault in the tuck position during the World University Games in 1983; on the way down, he smashed his head on the board..

The Story of Diving

The earliest record of diving is a painting in a burial

chamber south of Naples that dates from 480bc, but we can safely assume that people were doing it long before this..As an organised sport, diving began in northern Europe in the nineteenth century.. In Sweden and Germany the nationalist gymnastic movements were part of a wide cultural current that venerated nature and called for athletes to embrace wild waters and the sea.. Inevitably, diving became part of the curriculum..

It was in the municipal swimming pools of Victorian Britain that diving first assumed competitive form. . In 1883 England’s Amateur Swimming Association held the first plunge diving championships, where competitors leapt from starting blocks into the pool and stayed underwater as long as possible.. By 1895 the British National Diving Championships boasted separate events for standing and running dives, with springboards.. Meantime, High- board diving was pioneered in Scandinavia by Otto Hageborge and CF Mauritzi, who came to London in the 1890s and put up a tower in Highgate Ponds, where they wowed the public with fancy dives and twists..

Diving arrived at the Olympics in 1904 in a state of flux.. Different traditions in the Anglo-Saxon world and continental Europe remained unreconciled; the judging and scoring of dives was problematic, and equipment and techniques were primitive..The sport

has been sharply rationalised since then, and the Olympics has provided a testing ground for its development..

Game On: Diving Basics

Olympic diving comes in two distinct formats, using

3-metre springboards and 10-metre platforms.. There are

competitions in both formats for men and women and for indi- vidual and synchronised diving, which was introduced to the Olympics in 2000. . Synchronised divers perform the same dive simultaneously, or mirror-image dives (pinwheeling), and are judged on both the quality of the individual dives and their relationship to each other..

In all formats, there are two rounds: a compulsory set of dives (chosen by the judges) and an optional set (chosen by the athletes)..

tures: the form of the take-off, the position of the diver during flight, and the rotations – somersaults and twists – performed during the dive..There are six ways in which divers spring from

the board or platform: forward; back; reverse; inward; twist;

and handstand.

There are four different positions that a diver can assume in flight: straight; pike; tuck; and free..And there are two kinds of

rotation: somersaults and twists..

The Finer Points

Here are the key points to look out for if you want

to do your own scoring:

Take-off.. Judges are looking for smoothness of approach and the steadiness of handstands..

Flight..A high apex of flight is awarded extra points, while getting too close to the diving board or platform is penalised.. Pointed toes score well, but if you let your feet drift apart you will be marked down..

Entry..The diver should enter the water at 90 degrees to the surface; the more acute the angle of entry the lower the score. . Similarly the fewer splashes a diver creates on entry, the higher the score..

Finally, beware of Greeks in tutus. .There should, perhaps have been one more gold medal for the Chinese in the synchronised diving competition at Athens 2004, where Bo Peng and Kenan Wang went into the final stretch of the event well ahead of their rivals.. Before they could make it on to the boards, a man in the audience dashed on to a diving board and stripped off to reveal a pink tutu..After a couple of minutes of clowning and cheering, he dived into the pool before being apprehended..The arena calmed down but the rattled Chinese scored a zero for their next dive, handing the gold medal to the Greeks..

Diving Goes to the Olympics

Diving is an unlikely and perhaps erratic barometer of

global politics, but since 1904 it has boiled down to a series of fights between the USA and its various challengers for political hegemony: first the Germans,then the Japanese in the inter-war period,followed by Cold War duels with the Eastern Bloc..Today,American diving is having to come to terms with the rise of China..

Diving made its Olympic debut in St Louis in 1904, where the aquatic events proved to be a fractious affair, with the US and Germany quarrelling over the rules of almost every acquatic event.. (US officials banned the Germans from the 4 x 50yd swimming relay on the grounds that they weren’t all from the same club, clearing the path for American swimmers to claim all the medals..) In the dive events, the plunge for distance competition – in effect, an underwater long jump, now sadly discontinued at the Olympics – was unproblematic.. But the fancy diving proved difficult..

The Germans had brought their own diving board – a plank covered with coconut matting – that was mounted on a floating pontoon in the lake..They also wanted dives to be marked only for acrobatic content and not for the quality of the entry or finish: the Germans twisted and rolled beautifully but were happy to crash into the water belly or back first.. Some Germans refused to compete and, after a third place dive-off saw Alfred Braunschweiger walk off in a huff, the German delegation was so incensed that Dr Lewald, the Imperial High Commissioner to the World’s Fair (of which the Games were a part), withdrew his offer of an honorary bronze statuette for the winners..The American winner, George Sheldon, refused to accept his medal at the time due to the chaos..

Over the next twenty years the format of the sport was steadily rationalised..Tariff values were introduced for different dives in

1908, a blend of compulsory and optional routines became

the norm. .Women began to compete in 1912, and springboard diving was added to the platform version..

Still, the complexity of the rules and the bias of judges created problems..At the women’s platform competition in Paris in 1924, the Swedish judge awarded first place to the Swedish diver, the Danish

judge awarded first place to the Danish diver,and theAmerican judge awarded joint first place to all three American divers..The British and French judges went for Caroline Smith (USA), whose consequent victory was the first of seven in a row for American female platform divers..

Greg

Born to Swedish and Samoan parents, Greg Louganis was adopted by Greek-Amer- icans in southern California. After early encounters with acrobatics and dancing, he became a teenage diving sensation, winning a silver medal at the Montreal Olympics at sixteen and winning the world championships two years later. After missing the 1980 Moscow Games, along with the rest of the American team, he excelled in Los Angeles, winning two golds with record scores. He repeated the feat

in Seoul in 1988,but in the preliminary springboard competition smashed his head on the board after attempting a reverse pike somersault.Despite the concussion and the two-inch wound in his scalp, he performed the dive later in the competition and won the gold.

In 1994,Louganis made his comeback as an announcer and star turn at the Gay Games.He was out of the closet and the following year disclosed in his autobiography that he was HIV positive – a matter of some consternation to the diving fraternity, who panicked over the possible consequences of his blood leaking into the pool at the Seoul Olympics. He also revealed the shatteringly tough childhood he had endured – learning difficulties, bullying at school,sexual abuse at home,teen bingeing on drugs and alcohol.

Diving, it appeared, was not merely his vocation but his salvation. Since then, Louganis has appeared in a number of Hollywood movies, publicly campaigned on HIV issues and taken up competitive dog agility trials, in addition to coaching a new generation of divers.

Similar problems surfaced after the SecondWorldWar, but with a distinctly Cold War gloss to them.. In Melbourne in 1956 Mexican Joaquin Capilla Pérez won the platform gold on his final dive, edging the American diver GaryTobian by just 0..03 points..The US team claimed that the Soviet and Hungarian judges were biased but Perez kept his gold (which together with his two bronze and one silver medal, made him Mexico’s most successful Olympian)..

Thereafter, under American pressure, the authorities started to tighten up on judging.. It was indicative of the new regime that a Soviet judge was removed from the Rome Games in 1960 after accusations of partiality.. In fact, the USSR never broke American hegemony, and its gold medal in the men’s springboard at Moscow 1980 required both the absence of the USA and some help from above.. Aleksandr Portnov of the Soviet Union was allowed to repeat one of his dives after he claimed he was distracted by crowd noise.. He went on to win gold, though three of his competitors protested that they were subjected to the same noise..

America’s extraordinary domination of Olympic diving peaked in the Reagan years with the arrival of Greg Louganis (see above).. Since his retirement the balance of power in diving has shifted to the Chinese, whose rise is attributable above all to the obsessive and meticulous Xu Yiming. .Working without books, equipment or facilities in the wake of the Cultural Revolution, Yiming constructed his own diving boards and trampolines in order to train his youngsters.. His dedication has paid off spectacularly: since 1992 China has won eleven out of a possible sixteen men’s gold medals, and thirteen out of sixteen for the women, including four for the brilliant Fu Mingxia – who in 1991 became world champion at the age of twelve, the youngest in any sport, ever..

EQUESTRIANISM

27 July–9 AugUST 2012

Greenwich Park

Athletes: 200 | Golds up for grabs: 6

Olympic presence

1900–present.

Olympic Format

There are individual and team competitions in dres-

sage, show jumping and cross-country eventing.. Equestrianism is the only sport at the Olympics in which men and women compete against each other on equal terms..

Contenders:

In recent years the strongest equestrian nations

have been Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Britain and New Zealand.. Given recent doping problems and the consequent turmoil in several teams, however, all bets are off..

Past Champions:

Germany: 21 | Sweden: 17 | France: 12

Why Watch Equestrianism?

At the Rome Games of 1960, all seemed lost for the

Australians in the equestrian competition. . One of their riders, Bill Roycroft, had fallen badly during the steeplechase section: his horse, Our Solo, had somersaulted over an obstacle, thrown him to the ground and then landed on him.. Somehow, Roycroft had managed to remount and finish the course; then, after being

140 HOW TO WATCH THE OLYMPICS

administered oxygen and whisky, he’d been flown to hospital in a helicopter..The following day was the show jumping, the final discipline in the event, and Australia had only two fit horse-rider combinations left..They needed three, so Roycroft insisted on competing.. Heavily sedated, he was hoisted on to his horse by the rest of the team, before producing a flawless round that brought him and his team a gold medal..

Olympic equestrianism is not for the faint-hearted: eventers have to get their horses over more than thirty huge fences, ditches, banks and water jumps, while show jumpers must, under pressure of time, negotiate some terrifyingly high barriers and gallop through a complex array of obstacles..The intricate movements of the dressage, which demand the appearance of effortless control, are executed under the highest levels of scrutiny..With its roots in military horsemanship and fox hunting,equestrianism was once the most exclusive sport at the Games, and it still retains an aristocratic and military cast.. On the other hand, it’s unique in allowing men and women to compete as equals, and increasingly the women are coming out on top..

The Story of Equestrianism

For more than three millennia human beings have

been training horses for transport, war, work and pleasure.. Dres- sage and eventing have their roots in the practical needs and competitive spirits of the cavalry regiments of early modern Europe.. Dressage, an adaptation of the French word for ‘training’, was initially a means to an end, a system that prepared horse and rider for the parade ground and the battlefield by emphasising style, control and precision.. Modern dressage was first systematised by the Neapolitan nobleman Federico Grissone, who established his riding academy in Naples in 1532 and published Gli ordini di cavalcare, the defining guide to horsemanship for more than three centuries..

Grissone’s influence spread to German-speaking Europe, Scandinavia, Russia and Britain, but it was his French disciples who