BARCELONA: Malaysian divers Pandelela Rinong and Cheong Jun Hoong paid dearly for a disastrous last dive as they narrowly missed out on a prized medal in the women’s 3m springboard synchro final at the World Championships in Barcelona yesterday.
They finished fifth out of 12 pairs behind China, Italy, Canada and Mexico.
With gold and silver as good as belonging to Wu Minxia-Shi Tingmao of China and Tania Cagnotto-Francesca Dallape of Italy, the battle for third spot went down to the wire between Malaysia and Rebecca Gallantree-Alicia Blagg of Great Britain with one more dive to go.
Pandelela-Jun Hoong who amassed 229.80 points, were leading by just 1.8 point cushion ahead of the British pair (228.00).
The pressure was certainly on Gallantree-Blagg, who went on to perform their dive first and they flopped after garnering just 56.73 to end their campaign with a total score of 284.73 over five attempts.
Pandelela-Jun Hoong only had the easiest task of pulling off an average dive to confirm the bronze medal.
But disaster struck as Jun Hoong made a bad entry, resulting in a big splash.
The final dive earned them 59.40 to make it 289.20 points in total and found themselves trailed 1.5 points behind Mexico’s Laura Sanchez-Arantxa Chavez (290.70) who led by 6.6 points before entering the final round.
But the Mexican were equally heartbroken too as Canada’s Pamela Ware-Jennifer Abel (292.08) overtook the bronze medal position from them with one final decent attempt.
Minxia continued her legacy by winning her sixth gold of the event with new partner Tingmao, chalking 338.40 points to comfortably beat five-time European champions Dallape-Cagnotto (307.80).
It was the second silver for the Italian pair, having settled for first runner-up spot in Rome in 2009 as well.
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