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A slip and an underwater scream: Aussie pair distraught after fluffing their last dive
By Rob Harris
Paris: With a slip of the foot an Olympic dream was over. Four years of hard work up in smoke.
As Anabelle Smith and partner Maddison Keeney made their final spring, Smith lost her footing on the corner of the board and flew off at right angles. She spun and landed without the grace usually associated with this sport, making a splash for the wrong reasons and breaking hearts.
There was an audible gasp from the crowd, an underwater scream, some tears but then defiance.
“I’m not dying, so I’m alright,” said Smith, whose botched final dive in the women’s synchronised 3m springboard event cost her and Keeney at least a bronze medal.
“I think it’ll take some time to sink in, but I just feel bad for letting the team down. I’m fine with myself, but you don’t want to let someone down in the process.
“Unfortunately, that is sport, and I just happened to do it on the biggest stage.”
Bronze medallists in Rio eight years ago, the pair were well clear in third and challenging for silver as they approached their fifth and final dive at the Paris Aquatics Centre on the opening day of the Games on Saturday.
Heartbreak: Maddison Keeney and Anabelle Smith missed the medals.Credit: Getty Images
Having been regular podium placers at major championships in past few years – including gold at this year’s French Open, which doubled as the Olympic test event at the new Aquatics Centre – they carried high hopes for Australia’s first medal.
But their last difficult dive – two-and-a-half somersaults with one twist in pike – was one of the worst of the entire event as the pair hit the water well out of synch. Smith looked inconsolable.
The shattered duo were left in fifth place, with Chinese sensations Yani Chang and Yiwen Chen – who paired up to win this event at the last three world championships – scoring a total of 337.68 points to take China’s second gold at the Paris Games.
It’s the sixth consecutive Olympic gold medal in this event for China since the 2004 Athens Games. The country has taken 47 of 64 gold medals in diving, in addition to 23 silver and 10 bronze, since winning its first at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.
Smith and Keeney finished with 292.20 points and were leapfrogged by British pair Yasmin Harper and Scarlett Mew Jensen, who took bronze with 302.28 points.
Keeney said she caught something going wrong out of the corner of her eye but didn’t realise how “mayday” it was until she was left to console her distraught colleague out of the water.
“She said, ‘I’m sorry’, and I said, ‘Don’t worry about it’. Sometimes you don’t know what to say. Time heals all wounds. This will not go down as a positive memory, but it will go down as a memory,” she said. “We’ve been diving really well. There’s nothing more we could have done.”
Smith, 31 and at her fourth Olympics, says she let out a huge scream underwater. She composed herself to take questions from journalists anxious to understand what happened with aplomb.
“I was hoping the cameras weren’t on the underwater shot right then, but yeah, just disappointing,” she said.
“But that’s diving. We’re trying to control our bodies and spin lots of times on a very bouncy, uneven plank. I just had a bad hurdle and landed on the side of the board, which obviously affects the rest of the dive.”
Australia’s chef de mission, Anna Meares, said athletes were the “real-live reality TV stars”.
“We sit there, and we watch in hope or anticipation of those successful moments, but we also witness those moments that become tough, where they make a slip, they have an accident, they experience emotional devastation like we’ve seen for our divers,” she said.
“No matter what happens outside the gates of the Olympic village is that every athlete as they come back in they feel the love, they feel the support and that we’re there for them.”
The silver went to “Team Cook’N Bacon”, the US pairing of Sarah Bacon and Kassidy Cook, who earned America’s first medal in women’s synchronised springboard diving since 2012. Bacon was making her Olympic debut at 27, and Cook, 29, was returning to the Olympics for the first time since 2016.
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