July 24, 2018
Canada wins gold at FINA World Junior Diving Championships
Diving Plongeon Canada – KIEV, Ukraine –Henry McKay of Ottawa and Victor Povzner of Maple, Ont., won a dramatic gold medal in the men’s synchronized three-metre on Tuesday at the FINA World Junior Diving Championships.
It was Canada’s first medal of the competition.
McKay and Povzner earned 300.33 points to edge Lou Massenberg and Karl Schone of Germany in second at 298.56 while Daniel Restrepo and Luis Felipe Uribe of Colombia were third at 290.88.
The Canadian pair kept their eyes on the scoreboard throughout the competition and were ready when they executed their twisting dive in the last round.
‘’It was our most stressful dive,’’ said McKay. ‘’But we were in the zone. We actually took out the calculators before to see what score we needed to get on the podium. We always look at the scores to relieve pressure. It helps us focus on our goals.’’
After the dive, the Canadians assumed they had won the silver. But the Chinese pair of Zongyuan Wang and Luxian Wu of China, the last divers in the final, failed their final round dive and dropped from first to fifth and leave Canada with the gold.
‘’We watched the Chinese practice their harder dives this week in training,’’ said Povzner. ‘’We thought about raising the difficulty on some dives but we felt consistency would be the key to our success.’’
On women’s platform in the 14-15 age group, it was a 1-2 Chinese finish with Jialing Liu first, Yanwei He second while Rin Kaneto of Japan was third.
Tatiana Conn of Calgary advanced to her second final of the competition and placed eighth.
On women’s one-metre in the 16-18 age group, Tong Ma of China won the gold medal with Uliana Kliueva of Russia was second at 398.35 and Maria Coburn of the U.S. third at 393.05.
Mélodie Leclerc of Montreal was 13th in the preliminaries and missed a berth in the final by one spot only 1.6 points from qualifying.
Competition runs through to Sunday.
Full results: http://www.diverecorder.co.uk/live/meet4/selectevent.php
For more information:
Dominique Ladouceur
Consultant, Communications and Media Relations
Diving Plongeon Canada
Cell : 514 576-2379 Email: dominique@diving.ca
Website: www.diving.ca
Twitter / Facebook / Instagram: @DivingCanada