“We have been saying that the Chinese are not invincible,” said Osmar Olvera. “I really believe that when we got to the top of the rankings, they trembled.”
The Chinese Daoyi Long and Zongyuan Wang synchronize even when passing towels over their foreheads. The Mexicans Juan Manuel Celaya and Osmar Olvera completed radically different protocols in the most delicate area of all: the board, 5 meters long and half wide. Any detail at the start causes a catastrophe, but Juan Manuel took three long steps while Osmar took one step, paused and then pushed himself towards the last support. They went free until the spring threw them. Then they coupled in the air. There they are identical. Their last jump, the sixth in the series, had a difficulty of 3.9, the most difficult of the total of 48 that made up the eight couples’ competition in the final of synchronized diving from the three-meter springboard held on Friday morning at the Paris Games. No one risked more than the Mexicans. Their acrobatics, a double somersault with two twists, were two drops of water falling at the same time. The pool greeted them like two ghosts. Just a bubbling sound. The audience went wild. “Mexico! Mexico! Mexico…!” But the 11 judges, like the eleven priests of Dodona, issued a verdict that is mysterious: 94.74 points. Slightly less than the score they gave to the last Chinese jump: 95.74.
The decision turned the competition, which Mexico had been leading until the fifth jump, in favour of China. The Asians’ dominance continued with a total score of 446.10 points against 444.03 for the Americans. The smallest difference ever between gold and silver. China was never more threatened. Moved by the scare, Long and Wang stopped synchronising. The young Long cried and the veteran Wang consoled him. China won its seventh consecutive gold in this speciality, which was incorporated into the Olympic programme at the Sydney Games in 2000.
Oblivious to the drama, the Spaniards are happy. “This is a big deal,” said Nicolás García Boissier. “Impressive,” said Adrián Abadía, his flatmate and training partner for three years in Madrid. After winning bronze at the World Championships in Doha in February, a milestone, they had just finished sixth in what is probably the most technical discipline of all the specialties in the show jumping programme. It is Spain’s best result in its history. There is only one precedent for another Spaniard in a show jumping final: Ricardo Camacho in Moscow, where he finished eighth thanks to the boycott of the United States.
“In Spain there are only 88 licences for this sport and our country has managed to get four divers to Paris,” said Nicolás, who will turn 30 and will now dedicate himself to naval engineering. “At least we hope that with what we have just achieved, we will get over 100 licences.”
“Our series was the easiest”
Led by the Italian Domenico Rinaldi and the Cuban Arturo Miranda, the Spaniards approach the competition from a conservative perspective. They play at not making mistakes and waiting. But the British and the Italians do not make mistakes, and the French do not synchronise, but the judges award them some points, courtesy of the organisation to the host. “Our place was in the top-5 and as the competition was going, we could not do anything,” concludes Nicolás. “Our series of jumps was the easiest of the eight. We are where we knew we could be.”
Long and Wang from China, Celaya and Olvera from Mexico, Harding and Laugher from the United Kingdom, Marsaglia and Tocci from Italy, Bouyer and Jandard from France, Abadía and García from Spain, Kolodiy and Konovalov from Ukraine, and Downs and Duncan from the United States form a circle. A queue of young men with sculpted muscles armed with towels go from the jacuzzi to the stairs, from the stairs to the diving board, from the diving board to the water and from there to the shower, and to the jacuzzi, and back to the stairs. The final is a ritualized act in which everyone pursues a form of beauty that they do not see, but imagine, while the public enjoys the show. “I have not even seen the competition,” says Adrian Abadía, the diver from Mallorca, who has lived through the final trying to concentrate on his routine. “We will watch it on TV,” says Nicolas.
The queue they form is reminiscent of the queues at any ministry, but here there are no women, only adrenaline-fuelled men who hug each other and encourage each other as if the springboard anchored to a hinge were the window that gives the result of a competition to enter the body of registrars and notaries. Something that will change their lives forever. As Osmar Olvera says: “Well, it tastes like gold, the truth is that it tastes like gold.”
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