Springboard, Women

The men’s individual events in London had both provided unexpected defeats for the heavily favoured Chinese world champions. The women’s competitions however stayed faithful to the predicted versions of events. For a decade Wu Minxia had been one of the elite of world diving but, although she had now won three successive titles at synchro, she had never won the individual Olympic title. Wu scored the highest marks on 13 of her 15 competitive dives and was a convincing winner ahead of teammate He Zi with Laura Sánchez adding to Mexico’s fine Games in the diving pool by sneaking the bronze by just 0.2 points. Afterwards it was revealed that Wu’s family had withheld the 2011 death of her grandmother and the fact that her mother had been battling cancer for the last eight years in order to “free her from distractions”. It was a revelation that caused criticism even in the Chinese press.