Power ranking every single sport at the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics
By Nick Villano
12. Diving
Yeah, we finally made it to the Olympics. These are the events we think of. It feels a little strange we’re starting with diving, but it also makes sense. This is absolutely a quintessential Olympic sport, but it might be last on the list when asking die-hard Olympics fans to name them.
Diving used to be a simple sport, of people just going up high distances and diving into the water below. Then, Germans started doing “fancy” dives which involved flips and tricks. That’s the diving we know and love today. Each year, we see these divers trying to outdo the generation before them, finding new ways to throw caution to the wind and try and quintuple flip from the high dive before landing so subtly into the water that it barely makes a splash.
We tend to ask ourselves “How?” very often during the Olympics, but this one is pretty universal. What these athletes can do, from either a springy board close to the water or a stagnant high dive, seems improbable at least.
It’s a loosely judged sport without strict rules about how a judge should come to their conclusion, only to say they should consider how aesthetically pleasing a diver’s movements are, the complexity of the dive, and how well the diver enters the water. Those all seem pretty ambiguous, which is a problem with diving. Unfortunately, for now, these are the rules they live with.