Hitting the water flat on your back is probably not the way to go in a diving competition.
But even an accomplished olympian occasionally slips at just the wrong moment. Mistiming something that requires so much precision is difficult to recover from no matter how good you are.
Russian diver Nadezhda Bazhina, a 28-year-old with 14 European Championship medals to her name, had an Olympic Games to forget when she made an absolute bags of her dive in the 3m springboard.
Apparently, Bazhina’s foot slipped at the crucial time and things just got worse from there. Don’t get us wrong – our diving repertoire doesn’t extend much beyond a forward roll into the deep end, and Bazhina begins hers by somersaulting with the best of them. It’s the landing that things very quickly turned sour for, and a score of 0.0 shows just how badly this went in the eyes of the judges.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJE6xNSAg58
Again, we don’t want to be too hard on the Russian athlete; it was clearly just a little blip. But unfortunately for her, when re-watching the dive we can’t help but be reminded of an old John Smith’s advert.
Where was famed Olympic diving legend Peter Kay when she needed him?
Top bombing.
