Montréal, November 27th, 2024 – Quebecers Samuel Talbot and Arnaud Corbeil placed seventh in the boys’ 14-18 age group 10 m synchronized final on Wednesday at the World Junior Diving Championships in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
The 16-year-old Canadian athletes tallied 270.72 points, finishing less than 1 point behind Great Britain and sixth position. Italy’s Raffaele Pelligra and Simone Conte took gold ahead of Mexico (295.32) and Germany (294.00).
“We’re happy, but we would have loved to get a better result. We didn’t have enough practice time, and we hope to do even better in the future,” summed up Arnaud Corbeil, who was competing in his last event at this edition of the Worlds.
For his part, Samuel Talbot gave a more detailed summary of the duo’s performance.
“Our five dives were fairly consistent. […] Our first optional dive was quite good, but I made a small mistake on the second one and we scored 4’s. Our last dive was our best, so we’re satisfied because we got the result we wanted. We pulled it off just like we practised.”
The two divers know each other well but hadn’t teamed up for some time due to various circumstances.
“We had already dived together at the World Junior Championships in Montreal (in 2022) when we were both 14 years old. Our last synchronized competition was two years ago,” recalls Talbot, who had then finished ninth with his teammate.
“During training back home, we were both slightly injured, so we didn’t really get to practice the 10 m platform together. So it wasn’t anything new, but it had been a long time since we’d done it”, added the young athlete who will climb back on the tower in the individual competition next Saturday.
Mathilde Laberge (Quebec, 343.75) and Lila Stewart (Saskatchewan, 335.65) finished 20th and 22nd respectively in the 16-18 age group girls’ 3 m springboard qualifying round and could not progress to the afternoon final. Only the top 12 from the preliminaries were qualified for the deciding round.
The two Canadians will step back on the springboards on Thursday for the 14-18 age group girls’ 3 m synchronized final.
On the same day, Samuel McCaffrey (Quebec) and Emmitt Reesor (Ontario) will take part in the boys’ 16-18 age group 1 m preliminaries, aiming to earn a spot in the afternoon final.
More information :
Alexandra Piché
Manager, Communications
Diving Canada
C: 514 625-5513
alexandra@diving.ca