Diver Tanya Watson made history in Tokyo today, as she became the first Irish female diver to compete at the Olympic Games.
A superb performance from the 19-year-old today – who qualified for Tokyo 2020 through World Rankings last May – saw her qualify through to the semi-finals of the Women’s 10m Platform in 16th position with 289.4 points. Tomorrow’s semi-final will see the top 18 scores from today’s 30 divers compete, with the top 12 from there contesting the final on Thursday.
Watson performed consistently across the five dives, which ranged in difficulty from 2.8 to 3.2. In the first dive, Watson performed a back 2 ½ somersaults, 1 ½ twists with a difficulty level of 3.2. Her score of 62.4 points set her up for the remainder of the session, ranking 13th at that early stage.
This was followed by a forward 3 ½ somersaults, a back 2 ½ somersaults and a reverse 2 ½ somersaults, where she held steady in rankings. Her final dive was an inward 3 ½ somersaults, which had a difficulty of 3.2 to finish out the preliminaries as the 16th ranked diver.
Speaking after her Olympic debut Watson said, “I feel great, and just excited to go out there again and do my dives and get through again tomorrow. My first dive was pretty good for me, everything was consistent, so all my dives were on the head. But I just need to work on tomorrow – my entries, there was some splash there which I would like to get rid of. My first, second, third, fourth, fifth dives, they were all consistent. So I’m really, really happy with that.”
Tomorrow the top 12 divers move to the finals, a realistic target for Watson on the back of today’s consistent performance.
“My plan into the semi-finals is that I personally want to enjoy it again. I did really good diving today, so I’m really excited to find that again. Also tomorrow, I want to work on my entries into the water.”
