Canadian Alexander Despatie cuts the water like a knife---and wins silver with a 9.4 dive. China's He Chong could have done a belly flop, or dove off the divingboard stairs onto the concrete for his final dive off the three metre board and still taken home a medal. Instead, he gets gold with a complicated, infinite-loop-infinite-flip, lazer-cutter of a dive, taking gold easily. There's something of a gut-wrenching excitement to diving for me. I once dove off the 10m platform in an olympic-sized pool, and even though I fell feet-first, and passed through the water fairly well, it never occured to me that after my feet, the next point of impact...well...ahem...was not a good one. So, as I sank to the bottom, I realized that there was yet another olympic sport I'd never compete in. And I was glad.The way they code dives is interesting There are actual alpha-numeric codes to describe various dives. Oddly, and obtusely, it's the way, in the 1800s, they described wheel configuration in steam engines---the whyte configuration.
