Editorial content for the 2023 World Aquatics Championships is sponsored by FINIS, a longtime partner of Swimming World and leading innovator of suits, goggles and equipment. Worlds Diving: China Adds Two More Golds as Bacon-Cook Miss bronze by .6 Points China added a pair of medals in competition on Monday, moving them to 7-for-7 at the World Aquatics Championships in Fukuoka, Japan. Chang Yani and Chen Yiwen captured the 3-meter women’s springboard competition, while Lian Junjie and Yang Hao claimed the men’s platform synchro. Chang and Chen turned in the highest-scoring diving of each round, tallying 341.94 points to easily distance the field. The duo defended its title from Budapest. It’s the fourth medal at Worlds for each, Chang’s dating to when she was 15 at the 2017 Worlds and won this event with Shi Tingmao. Chen is the reigning 3-meter springboard solo champ. The Chinese duo tallied scores of 75.60 points, 81.84 and 80.10 in the last three rounds. No other pairing topped 71 points. Second went to Great Britain, with Yasmin Harper and Scarlett Mew Jensen scoring 296.58. Despite a difficult final round dive, they held on to silver easily ahead of Elena Bertocchi of Chiara Pellacani of Italy. The final round decided bronze. The American duo of Sarah Bacon and Kassidy Cook was in third place the entire way. But they scored only 54.90 points on the final dive, hurt by a pair of scores in the fours. That was the 11th-highest score out of 12 pairings, which allowed Bertocchi and Pellacani to hop into bronze. Their total of 62.10 points gave them 285.99, Bacon and Cook settling for fourth in 285.39. Canada’s Mia Vallee and Pamela Ware were fifth with 284.22 points. “It was great because we did practice a lot together,” Pellacani said. “This medal was a very unexpected medal, but we are proud of it. The (USA divers) are both really good divers. We competed together at the 2020 Tokyo Olympic games. Our next goal is the 2024 Paris Olympic Games. We will train together every day to win an Olympic medal.” Lian and Yang had one bobble, but they were way too far ahead for it to matter. They had the highest-scoring dive of every round save for the fifth, when they still tallied 90.24 points, fourth-most. A total of 477.75 easily put them ahead of Ukraine’s Kirill Boliukh and Oleksii Sereda. The Ukrainians took silver in 439.32. Mexico’s Randal Willars Valdez and Kevin Berlin Reyes were third in 434.16. Lian and Yang punctuated the win with the best dive of the day, a 109C that tallied 98.79 points. “I am happy to win a gold medal, which gives me confidence to go forward to the Paris Olympics,” Yang said. “I was not surprised to find that the Ukraine team got the silver medal, because I have seen them be very competitive at previous competitions. When we face them as a competitor, we should have a sense of crisis. The goal of the China team is to win all the gold medals at the Paris Olympics. In order to make it come true, the most important thing is to keep our condition stable. After all, we’re one team, we go forward together.” The medal is the sixth career Worlds accolade for Yang, who paired with Lian to win the event last year in Budapest. He also won platform synchro in 2017 and 3-meter mixed synchro in 2015. Lian won 10-meter mixed synchro in 2019 and 2017. It was a joyous medal for Sereda and Boliukh, who have trained in Ukraine even as that country has faced a war with Russia. “Our biggest challenge leading up to the competition is the current state of our country,” Sereda said. “The ongoing war makes us unable to undergo the complete training program that we need. We always need to take shelter in a safe location when we are under the threat of air raids. The air raid sirens greatly hinder our ability to sleep. We have to always be ready to rush to the air raid shelter at a moment’s notice. This is what everyday life is like during a war. Due to the war we don’t have the strongest program compared to the other athletes.” Great Britain’s Matthew Lee and Noah Williams finished fourth. The American duo of Brandon Loschiavo and Jordan Rzepka finished sixth with a score of 375.90.
