If there’s one thing people know about competitive diving
It’s that the splash is important
The perfect dive will have the smallest splash, like this highest scoring Olympic dive ever
by Matthew Mitcham from 2008.
But it’s not just this that determines the splash...
...it’s what happens underwater.
To figure out how Olympic divers get such small splashes, I spoke to the guy who trains them
My name is Drew Johansen, and I’m the head diving coach for the 2020 Olympic team
I coached in London in 2012, as well as in Rio in 2016
There's three components. There's the above water, there's the swim, and then there's
the underwater save.
Divers can’t change much once they’re in their air,
so when they push off, they have to give themselves enough height, enough distance from the board,
and enough angular momentum to complete the dive.
You're going 30 miles per hour. You have all the angular momentum of four and a half somersaults
on top of it. And you're anticipating that moment of hitting the water.
As they approach the water, athletes extend their body into a needlelike line, with their
toes pointed, knees locked, abs tight, arms up and hyperextended over their heads, elbows
pressing tight into their ears, and - most importantly - their hands in this position.
We'll have the athletes put their hands out and have them put their thumbs together interlocking
and then they'll grab on top
This creates what’s called a rip entry - named for this sound...
and its crucial for breaking through the water in a way that minimizes splash
To understand why this body position is key — let’s look at what happens when you’re
not in this position
if you slip and fall for instance, like Chinese diver Chang Yani did in the FINA world cup
semi finals, covered by NBC Sports
“Oh my goodness!”
Splashes come in two parts.
The initial splash is unavoidable.
As water is getting displaced, it has to move somewhere. It gets pushed down and out, creating
a radial jet that shoots up at 20 - 30 times the speed of the impact.
The second part of the splash is caused by the air that divers bring in with them.
When Yani’s body makes contact with the water, it creates an air-filled cavity.
As her body submerges, the cavity deepens,
And the surrounding water starts applying pressure.
That pressure is enough to cause the cavity to collapse in on itself:
It starts filling with water from the bottom up
There’s so much pressure and energy that that water ejects straight back up toward
the surface, resulting in a worthington jet - the second pop of the big splash we see here
This large splash earned Yani a scratch dive — zero points
Just a day later, Yani was able to create the total opposite — a tiny splash — thanks
to that hand position and her controlled and rigid body. This dive scored 73.5 points.
Just recently at our Olympic trials... we had a ninety point dive, actually, a couple
of them up there on the 10 meter platform
Like this dive by Team USA member Jordan Windle, which scored 96 points.
As his flat palms make contact with the water, they push it down and out.
He still gets that initial, unavoidable splash — but it’s tiny.
The flat hands create a cavity that's juuuust wide enough for his body to pass through.
The next steps in the rip entry work to minimize that second splash, the Worthington jet.
And they take place underwater.
As they enter the water, they're going to swim their hands out to the side.
This swim motion is clear in this 76.5 point
dive by Andrew Capiobanco, from an Olympic trial event in Indianapolis.
It moves some of the air brought into the water away from the center, breaking the air
cavity into smaller bubbles.
You'll see two white bubbles out to the side of the hole that the athlete went in .
Those are the swim bubbles.
And then the final component is another somersault that's created underwater that also will trap
the air that comes into the water and prevent it from coming up through the same hole that it went in
and delays it from coming back up.
And that's what reduces the splash as much as possible
This disperses air, breaking big bubbles into smaller bubbles, making them less splashy
when they rise to the top.
If performed correctly, the bubbles will be so small, that it looks almost like the water
is boiling at the surface
The perfect splash is what appears to be no splash at all.
There’s no official rules on splash size in the FINA rule book, But judges do use it
to impact scores.
It will fall under the category of overall impression. The judges will look at the technical
elements and they have the leeway in our subjective sport. When the dive has that
exclamation point on the end of it, it does bring the scores up and it is within the rules
for the judges to do that.
Getting a perfectly small splash isn’t the point of diving.
However, it is the punctuation to a job well done.