Jennifer Lukas, CTVOlympics.ca Staff
LONDON, England — Great Britain’s Tom Daley and Peter Waterfield finished seventh in their first diving final inside the London Aquatics Centre on Thursday, missing a “crucial” marker in the fifth round to plummet out of medal contention.
Daley and Waterfield, competing in front of a London home crowd in the men’s synchronized 10m platform event at the FINA Diving World Cup, sat in third place after four of six rounds of dives. During their fifth dive, a forward four-and-a-half somersault in the tuck position, both divers made errors that cost them dearly on the scoreboard.
“The front 4.5 is one of those dives that is crucial in the competition,” said Daley, one of Britain’s biggest names in amateur sport and the 2009 world individual champion in the platform event.
“It’s one of those dives where if you nail it… then you get launched right up the scoreboard. If you don’t, you drop down.”
Daley’s assessment rang true at the test event in London’s Olympic Park on Thursday. With their flop, Daley and Waterfield dropped from third place to seventh, where they remained for the rest of the evening.
While the British divers were the overwhelming crowd favourites, China continued its dominance of the World Cup as Cao Yuan and Zhang Yanquan won gold in the event with a total score of 481.29. Mexico earned silver while Germany finished third.
China, Germany and Ukraine had already secured their spots in 10m synchro at the Games with medal performances at last year’s World Championships in Shanghai, and Great Britain is given a berth by virtue of its status as host nation. With their finishes in the event on Thursday, Mexico, the United States, Cuba and Russia all qualified for the London 2012 Olympic Games, rounding out the eight nations that will compete there.
Canadians Kevin Geyson and Eric Sehn, who were fighting for what would have been Canada’s only Olympic berth in the event, fell short of qualifying but finished eighth in the World Cup competition.
Daley has been under fire recently, suffering the media aftermath of a rogue quote from Britain’s diving performance director, Alexei Evangulov.
“If you look at the Chinese, they work three times harder. That’s the only secret. Just work hard,” Evangulov said earlier this month.
“I know how the Chinese are training and they work much harder. If you compare them to Thomas, he has many commitments in his media activities.
“He’s very active, not like the Chinese. The Chinese have restricted their divers and I support them on this. I would recommend Tom to make not so many commitments to the media.”
Daley’s camp later issued a response, defending his media work. They said the 17-year-old diving star “turns down 95% of media and commercial approaches.”
Daley was pressed again on the issue after the British pair’s slightly disappointing result on Thursday, and Waterfield, 30, came to his diving partner’s rescue.
“We didn’t miss a dive because Tom’s been doing too much media. We missed a dive because we’ve had setbacks with injuries at the beginning of the year.”
Waterfield recently returned to training after a back and side injury kept him sidelined for much of the past two months. Daley is coming off a thumb injury of his own.
“It’s one thing, you know, being able to dive, but getting competition fit, you need to do competitions. and that’s what we’re going to be doing over the next few months,” said Waterfield.
“Now we’re both fit, we’re over our injuries, we just need to do some more competitions, get some more training in and we’ll start to peak when we need to.”
“Alexei knows the amount of training that I’m doing and he knows that I’m doing the right amount of training,” Daley added. “I’m doing as much as I can. I’m pushing myself as hard as I can go without my body breaking.
“It’s one of those things where I know that I’m working hard and I know myself and Pete are going to work hard going into the World Series and European Championships and then the Olympic Games.”