China Goes 1-2 On Women’s Platform With Pair of 13-Year-Olds

2019 FINA WORLD AQUATICS CHAMPIONSHIPS – DIVING

  • July 12th-20th, 2019
  • Nambu University Municipal Aquatics Center, Gwangju, South Korea
  • Diving Results

China remained perfect at the 2019 World Championships in diving, with a pair of 13-year-old competitors taking gold and silver on women’s 10-meter.

Women’s 10-Meter Platform

The two youngest competitors in the field by nearly five years, China’s Chen Yuxi (born September of 2005) and Lu Wei (born December of 2005) swept the two highest medals of the competition.

Chen obliterated the field, scoring 439.00 points. Lu scored 377.80 for second, and no one else was within 74 points of the gold medalist. Chen led from wire to wire, blasting a 76.5-point opening dive before ripping off four more dives worth 86+ points apiece. The competition was pretty well sealed by the third of five dives, an armstand back triple somersault with a huge 3.3 degree of difficulty. Chen scored a pair of 10s along with some 9.0s and 9.5s on that dive, scoring 94.05 points to build a 40-point lead on the field. She would follow that up with another 94-point dive in the next round: a back three-and-a-half with another 3.3 degree of difficulty.

Lu, already an owner of a gold medal through the women’s synchro 10-meter, finished solidly in silver medal position. She struggled a little on her second dive, dropping from 2nd to 6th while taking mostly 6.5s. But Lu scored 84 points on her own armstand back triple and 80 on her back three-and-a-half.

The two Chinese medalists dive the exact same list in the exact same order. This was another of the five events China lost at the 2017 World Championships – their two entrants last time around took silver and bronze, though.

American Delaney Schnell won the fourth overall diving medal for the United States, finishing in bronze position. Her 364.20 points were built on a big final dive, a 76-point front three-and-a-half that moved her from 5th to 3rd overall, passing Australia’s Melissa Wu and Canada’s Meaghan Benfeito.

Team USA is now tied with Mexico for the second-most total medals

Medal Finishers:

  1. Chen Yuxi (CHN) – 439.00
  2. Lu Wei (CHN) – 377.80
  3. Delaney Schnell (USA) – 364.20

MEDALS TABLE AFTER JULY 17TH

China remains undefeated in the diving portion of this year’s World Championships, holding 9 golds with just 4 events remaining. They also qualified 1st and 2nd in the men’s 3-meter springboard event: Xie Siyi was atop prelims and semifinals, and Cao Yuan moved up to second in semis as well.

The only remaining event that China lost in 2017 is the men’s 10-meter, where China went silver-bronze at the last Worlds. China won the men’s 3-meter, women’s 3-meter and mixed 3-meter, all still to come this week.

Rank Nation Gold Silver Bronze Total
1  China 9 1 1 11
2  Russia 0 3 0 3
3  Mexico 0 1 3 4
 United States 0 1 3 4
5  Great Britain 0 1 1 2
6  Canada 0 1 0 1
 Malaysia 0 1 0 1
8  South Korea* 0 0 1 1
Totals (8 nations) 9 9 9 27

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About Jared Anderson

Jared Anderson

Jared Anderson swam for nearly twenty years. Then, Jared Anderson stopped swimming and started writing about swimming. He's not sick of swimming yet. Swimming might be sick of him, though. Jared was a YMCA and high school swimmer in northern Minnesota, and spent his college years swimming breaststroke and occasionally pretending …

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