Platform Diving Photos By,Warren Clarke

TAKE-OFF

A: “We can usually tell from our take-off whether we’re exactly in synch with each other.

I count, so Melissa jumps when I say ... I wear the pants in the relationship. Well, I count, anyway.”

M: “Alex pretty much says ‘ready, go’ and then we go. But we’ve practised it a million times.”

A: “You can kind of see in your periphery as you jump if you’re in time. We generally know at the take-off if we’re going to be spinning and hitting the water at the same time. We don’t just cross our fingers and pray that it’s all worked out ... ”

M: “Taking off and seeing your partner still standing up on the platform ... that’s not exactly what we’re after.”

A: “At the Test event in London in February, we were training, it was loud. There were so many people training with and around us; spring boarders, platform, etc. The spring boards make a loud sound if you miss the jump. As I said ‘ready, go’, a spring board made a really loud sound ... Melissa didn’t hear my ‘ready, go’, so you can guess how our timing ended up. She saw me start moving out of her peripheral vision and thought to herself, ‘Quick, I better get going,’ but she couldn’t catch me. And I couldn’t slow down, either. Our coach was like, ‘What the hell?’

“If you don’t hear the count, you’re totally lost. You really do rely on every one of your senses.”

FALLING DOWN

M: “When you climb up to the 10m platform for the first time it’s really scary and you have a lot of adrenalin. When I was younger and learning some new dives, it was always exciting, but really scary as well. Once you’ve been doing it for a while, you kind of take it for granted.”

A: “It’s not like a ‘free’ feeling, because you have so many twists and sommersaults to do before you hit the water.”

M: “Yeah, when you have a specific purpose of executing a complicated dive, you don’t get that feeling in your belly of losing your stomach, like when you’re diving into a pool while having fun.”

FUEL FOR THOUGHT

A: “Staying hydrated on a comp day is really important. When you’re in a pool environment for so long each day, it’s stressful, it’s sometimes warm, you can get cold, and it’s important to keep your fluids up. Any kind of energy on comp days is good.”

M: “On comp days, as opposed to training ‒ when you just come in for a block session and then you go ‒ you’re at the pool for pretty much the whole day. You tend to just snack more on comp days because you don’t want a big belly full of lunch or something.

A: “A little bit of food regularly ... ”

‒ James Smith