Video:5 Diving Essentials to Learn From the Olympics

Transcript:5 Diving Essentials to Learn From the Olympics

Hi, this is Grant Seagull with Atlanta Diving, for About.com.   Today, I'm going to tell you some things that every diver should learn from the Olympic games.

Diving Technique

The first thing is how to enter the water cleanly. It is one of the first things that ever diver learns how to do, but, it is one of the most important things regardless of the level of diving you are competing at. The last thing any judge sees is how you enter the water. So even if your dive is not extremely pretty in the air, if you're able to get in the water cleanly, it is the final thing every judge sees and that is what they're judging you on. 

Preparing and Practicing for Diving

The next thing is to prepare every day as if it is a competition. Day in and day out you should practice like you are competing that day. There is no substitute for good practice when you are competing.

The next thing is to not listen to other people. Going into the Olympic games if you were to listen to everybody else they would've thought the Americans had no chance of winning a medal. At the end of the Olympic games, the Americans won four medals. It was the first medal they had one since two thousand.

The next lesson is to have a short memory. In the Olympics you have a prelims, a semi finals, and a finals. In the men's ten meter platform contest, the person that ended up winning was eighteenth after the preliminary rounds. So if he thought about how he did in the prelims during the finals David Badiya probably would not have won the Olympic games. He had a very short memory, and started every contest with a clean slate. So having a short memory is extremely important in our sport. 

Consistent Diving

The final lesson to learn is consistency. There is anywhere from six to eleven dives in every single dive contest. If you do one dive good and four dives bad, you are not going to be in the top of the pack. If you're able to preform your dives consistently, those are the divers that end up on top.

Whether you are in a two round contest or an eleven round contest the diver that does the most consistent on every single round is the diver that wins. 

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