Day 15 Review: China's eight medal Diving dream drowned

(BEIJING, August 22) -- Wow, what a busy last major day of competition we had here in Beijing with 32 gold medals handed out. Nine events bowed out with their last medals, six events doled out their first ones, and a few roll over to tomorrow.

There can be no more dramatic place to start than the National Aquatics Center – or Water Cube – where there was feverish expectation that China could complete its quest to collect all eight Beijing 2008 Diving medals.

All eyes were on Zhou Luxin and Huo Liang, the nailed-on host favorites who, true to form, had qualified for two of the top three places going into the final. Lurking in between was the ominous figure of Australian Matthew Mitcham.

On Saturday night, Zhou dived more consistently as Huo's challenge faltered. With one round left, China seemed on the cusp of clinching its eighth record breaking gold medal.

But Zhou then put in his worst dive of the night, worth just 74.80 points. World No. 3 Mitcham seized this moment by pulling out by far the best dive of the competition – a dive with a degree of difficulty of 3.8 to earn a whopping 112.10 points - enough to sweep Zhou off the top of the leader board and into the silver spot by some 4.80 points. Huo missed the medals completely as Gleb Galperin of Russia took bronze.

So near and yet so far – but it was a magnificent team effort by China's divers over the whole competition, and also by Mitcham, who took a remarkable victory.

From the pool to paddling...well, of sorts.

There was no mistaking China's dominance in Table Tennis with a clean sweep of all three Men's Singles medals - the first time this has ever been achieved.

The only slight upset was that World No. 2 Ma Lin beat World No. 1 Wang Hao fairly comfortably, by four sets to one. Wang Liqin, World No. 3, had earlier defeated Swedish veteran Jorgen Persson to take the bronze medal.

1  2  3  4  5  6  Next