Posted on 08/16/2016 2:35:18 PM PDT by dirtboy
Four years ago, Russia's Ilya Zakharov won gold in the men's 3m springboard. He looked fantastic back then. Fast-forward to 2016, with Zakharov competing in the semifinal for the same event. This time, everything fell apart for him.
His knees buckled mid-air, causing him to belly flop into the water. He scored zero points, which put a dent into his total score -- 555.90 back in 2012, but 345.60 in Rio -- and placed him in last place. The fact that he even made it to the semis is pretty noteworthy; during the preliminary round, Zakharov hit the board on his first dive, but still placed third after better dives.
(Excerpt) Read more at sbnation.com ...
Vodka?
Wait...you’re not supposed to enter the water like that? Well, I do! Because I meant to. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
One of my favorites!
Is this the direct link to the video?
https://youtu.be/aAgNqJ-kcas
I know nothing about competitive diving, so even this belly flop looks good to me.
It’s horrible. For whatever reason, he completely fell apart, both yesterday and today. I hate to see that happen.
Actual Zakharov dive video from NBCSports [it seems a lot of website links and posters are video-link-challenged]:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6w4um56U454
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Chinese are having some competition problems in Rio, too. I saw the end of the women’s beach volleyball. They lost the final match by something like 21 to 9.
Then of course was the American-muslim-in-a-headscarf who lost her 2nd bout in fencing and was elimiated early on.
Good thing for these belly floppers that it’s mostly empty seats, very few actual spectators.
“It’s horrible. For whatever reason, he completely fell apart, both yesterday and today. I hate to see that happen.”
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If it were me, I’d be so totally pleased with myself. As you can guess, I’m not much of a diver.
and then there was that Ukranian gymnast who just showed up and sat back down. What was the story behind that? Was he protesting something? I never got the full story.
I can manage to bounce off a springboard, curl up, and hit the water. That’s it. This guy is capable of some really complicated twists and flips in between leaving the board and hitting the water. He cocked it up big time. Bummer for him.
I miss the Acapulco cliff divers on ABC’s Wide World of Sports.
It was painful to watch. He was clearly pushed beyond his limits and got worse on successive dives.
I was half expecting him to jump off of the other end of the board to the asphalt below by this time.
When he entered the water, I thought he might try to crawl into the magical kingdom found in the drain at the bottom and hide there (early Twilight Zone reference).
The American team had trained in an outdoor pool in northern Brazil just before the Olympics. The windy conditions there helped them deal with the winds during the competition. Some divers, perhaps this one, did all of their training in an indoor pool. I feel sorry for an athlete who trains for a long time and then gets injured during competition.
What is worse? Doing a belly flop or oversleeping and missing your event?
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