My Commonwealth Games - Diving and Ribbon Waving

The last two events of the 2010 CWG in Delhi that I attended were the 10m Diving Finals and Rythmic Gymnastics Finals (you know, that thing where young girls in sparkly suits wave ribbons about), both held on Wednesday 13th October.

I attended the diving specifically to watch Matt Mitcham, who was probably the only Australian athlete whose name I knew before the competition. It was really interesting to see live, as opposed to televised. For one thing, there is a 30 minute warm-up period before the actual event. There were two 1m boards, three 3m boards, and three platforms at (I think) 5m, 7m and 10m. What was great to watch was that every board and platform was in simultaneous use as the divers warmed up. Someone would do a brilliant dive off the 10m platform while others did their moves from the boards or other platforms. There was a constant flow of fit young men, flinging themselves into space in the most graceful of ways. The photo above shows Matt Mitcham during the warm-up. Note the empty stadium.

There was also a man dressed as a CWG official, who did a Mr Bean-style tumble off the 10m platform, after pretending to lose his glasses in the pool. It was very silly but great fun.

There were three Aussie men in the finals: James Connor, Ethan Warren and Matt Mitcham. They all performed creditably. After 4 of the 6 rounds, it became obvious that it was a showdown between Tom Daley of England and Matt Mitcham of Australia. Then Tom Daley scored a perfect 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10. Unbelievable. Matt came back with a great dive but then his last one was a shocker, scoring 6s and 7s. And so the gold went to Tom Daley with the silver to Matt Mitcham. I must admit, it's the only time in the Games I've actually felt disappointed. I guess that's because of my expectations. I expected Matt to win and when he didn't, I somehow felt silver was not quite good enough. It's crazy the way the mind works.

Incidentally, I had breakfast the next morning with Tom Daley's uncle, who happens to be staying in the same hotel as I am. Nice chap. Made me feel better about him getting the gold. :-)

When the diving was over, I raced over to Indira Gandhi Stadium to catch the last hour of the ribbon-waving thing. When I say 'raced', I really mean crawled along in Delhi's appalling traffic, weaving about in an auto-rickshaw (three-wheeler, Australians call them tuk-tuks), listening to the blare of car and auto horns, driving up the wrong side of the road, dodging police wherever they were.

As usual, once I'd made it through the traffic, there was still a 2km walk to the stadium, followed by several security checks, including a radiation detector. I wasn't radioactive, in case you were wondering.



I saw lots of ribbon waving, and ball wobbling, and something to do with rope twirling. Some of it was quite entertaining. Some of it was saddening, for the performers for whom I'm sure it is a very important sport. Like when they drop the ball and it bounces off the stage, then they have to prance about to pick up another ball, all the while trying to pretend that this is all part of the act. Or when the Aussie girl put the ball behind her back, bent forward, then reached back and couldn't find the ball. The look of terror on her face was something to see.



Anyway, Australia's Naazmi Johnson won gold in the individual All-Round Final. As I knew that this was the really, really last time I was going to sing my national anthem in public (well, for a long time anyway) and as there was no-one else left in my stand, I decided to belt out the words at full volume. This caused enormous hilarity amongst Indians in other stands, who came scampering over to videotape me singing! I'm glad that I brought so much joy to the remaining spectators. Maybe I'll be on youTube one day. :-)