Answering the Questions of Women's Diving

By Laura Stanley on August 6, 2012

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Yesterday, my fiancé and I had a few friends over and watched the Olympics.

In the morning, we watched women’s water polo. Then later that evening, we watched diving, beach volleyball, and running. Running is kind of idiot-proof, when it comes to the results.

No matter who is watching, they know that the first person to cross the finish line is the winner. Beach volleyball has weird scoring, but the crowd in my living room was mostly men… they didn’t really care about the rules. My only question is why are those swimsuits so little?

But when our group was gathered around the women’s diving, we were collectively so confused about the rules that the conversation was constant. After the simultaneous cringe and gasp every time it looked like a girl was about to hit something on the diving board, we watched the scores. She would get like five scores, and then on the scoreboard she’d have like 300 points.

It took some very heated arguing to figure out that the median three scores were collected, not the highest three, and those were added up and multiplied by the difficulty level. Then, she would dive multiple times and those scores would all get added together (this explanation is for those of you who, like me, felt like a Labrador).

Of course, after we figured that out, we had to figure out how these judges could say a dive was awful. It seemed like every dive was an act of death defying awesomeness. One girl in particular was from the US, and her dives were intense. She was spinning so very fast! Then, her coach would look like he wanted to vomit, and her scores would be low.

Finally, they flashed up a multi-shot image to point out that her feet were a little bit apart, and she hit the water at a seven degree angle so that was a bad dive. While we were thankful that the announcers could sense our confusion, we couldn’t help but comment on how much control it would require to spin around a bunch of times and then hit the water perfectly straight.

It was all just very interesting to watch. The other question that was raised was why are they throwing their towel into the hot tub before they get in? I apparently missed the announcers talking about this, but the explanation is that shammies (or chamois) absorb water better if they are already wet. And apparently, the hot tub is to keep their muscles warm and flexible for their dives to prevent injury. That was another big question last night.

The final question that kept our living room crowd occupied during women’s diving was the mystery of the red marks on the Chinese divers. Our best explanation was that they were bandages for pulled muscles. It would make sense since they are located mostly on the ladies’ backs and thighs. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find a single source on this and were left to pondering.

I have to thank the announcers for aptly cluing us in to the rules of the sports. As much as I want to cheer on Team USA in all of the Olympic games, I have no idea what I’m watching half the time.

Do you ever find yourself confused while watching the Olympics? What questions have you been pondering about the Games?

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