The women's 10 meter platform event at Mexico City 1968.
Danger! Beauty! Precision! It's hard to fully appreciate the art of diving at the Games, because every competitor has nailed months and years of spot-on dives to achieve that Olympic berth. Diving is measured in tenths of points, thousandths of millimeters and millionths of seconds. The degrees between perfection and disaster are difficult to calculate.
At Seoul 1988, Greg Louganis of the U.S. hit his head against the platform while attempting a 2 1/2-somersault pike before winning gold. Long before that, four-time Olympic champion Pat McCormick was a fantastically lovely woman who paid for her missed dives with lacerations and breaks. And Sergei Chalibashvili of the Soviet Union fell into a coma and died, after cracking his skull against the platform at the 1983 World University Games.
Despite any and all cautionary tales, divers have been braving injury and death to perform their perilous plunges since ancient times. The cover slab of a Greek tomb dating from around 470 BC featured a diver in full flight, and throughout history human beings have used diving as a fun and exciting way to get into water. It wasn't until the 19th Century that folks held competitions to see who could do it with the most grace and style.
Diving has been an Olympic event since 1904, when American eye doctor George Sheldon became the first gold medalist in the sport. An early event was the plain high dive, in which competitors were docked points for failing to enter into the water in completely arrow-straight fashion. It was held in 1912 and 1920. The first Olympic plain diving champion was Erik Adlerz of Sweden, who as the 1912 Official Report put it, "jumped evenly and in good style." One poor competitor, Paul Guenther of Germany, sprained his arm when it struck his head upon water entry and had to drop out.
Plain diving was superseded by variety or fancy diving, which developed into the sport we see today at the Games. It was originally conceived as a way for gymnasts to practice their somersaults and twists with water landings instead of against hard floors. As the 20th Century continued, diving split into two sub-disciplines, the short springboard and the high platform.
It took many years for the sport to formulate a chart of acceptable dives, to create a logic-based scoring system, and to figure out how to balance compulsory dives and optional styles chosen by individual divers. Here are some of the basic dives that developed as the sport grew.
The sport's governing body, FINA, now has a scale and formula for "degree of difficulty," which measures the flight position, number of twists, approach and entry of a dive style, and assigns a point value. Seven judges score each dive in competition on a zero to 10 scale, and after the highest and lowest scores are removed, the degree of difficulty is applied as a coefficient.
The hardest dive in the world at the moment is a reverse 1 1/2 somersault with 4 1/2 twists. It features a 3.7 degree of difficulty.
Diving Fun Facts:
- Synchronized diving has been part of the Olympics since 2000. Two divers jump side by side, and a panel of nine judges determines both the quality of the dives and their synchronization. There are four events: men's and women's competitions in springboard and platform. China has won five of the eight available golds so far.
- It's hard to find a greater diver in Olympic history than China's Fu Mingxia. In 1992 at the age of 13, she won the women's platform gold for China, then defended her title at Atlanta four years later in a springboard-platform double. As a 22-year-old in Sydney, she repeated her springboard gold for her fourth Olympic championship overall. Here are some clips from that competition.
The legendary Fu was later signed to a spokeswoman contract for Sprite, but caused a stir when she showed up at her first news conference in Guangzhou wearing pants covered with English curse words such as "f**k you, b***h."
- Egypt has never won three gold medals at a single Games, but it came close in 1928 at Amsterdam. The country had won in weightlifting and wrestling, and the Egyptian anthem began playing for Farid Simaika, who stood atop the podium after winning the men's platform. But the judges had made a mistake -- despite Simaika's higher point total, Pete Desjardins of the U.S. had a lower ordinal numbers, which were the rules at that time. Nowadays, a higher point total determines the winner.
In 2008:
Diving will take place at the Beijing Games from August 10 through August 23 (Days 2-15) at the Watercube. The schedule of finals is as follows:
* August 10 (Day 2): Synchronized Springboard (W)
* August 11 (Day 3): Synchronized Platform (M)
* August 12 (Day 4): Synchronized Platform (W)
* August 13 (Day 5): Synchronized Springboard (M)
* August 17 (Day 9): Springboard (W)
* August 19 (Day 11): Springboard (M)
* August 21 (Day 13): Platform (W)
* August 23 (Day 15): Platform (M)
At the 2007 World Championships and the Diving World Cup held earlier this year, divers earned Olympic berths for their countries, which were then distributed via national trials. A total of 27 countries fill out the 136 entries, with China, Australia, Great Britain and the United States sending full complements of 12.
All-Time Medal Standings:
| Nation | Gold | Silver | Bronze | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 | 48 | 41 | 42 | 131 |
 | 20 | 13 | 5 | 38 |
 | 6 | 8 | 7 | 21 |
 | 4 | 4 | 6 | 14 |
 | 3 | 4 | 4 | 11 |
 | 3 | 4 | 2 | 9 |
 | 5 | 8 | 8 | 21 |
 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 7 |
 | 2 | 1 | 6 | 9 |
 | 1 | 4 | 4 | 9 |
 | 1 | 2 | 4 | 7 |
 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 2 |
 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 2 |
 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
 | 0 | 2 | 4 | 6 |
 | 0 | 2 | 1 | 3 |
 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 2 |
 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 |
 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 |
| | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 |
(Photo via 1968 Official Report)
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