The Olympic platform diving was on the other night. I noticed they tended to treat the platform like a springboard. Run up, jump in the air, land on the end, and bounce off. But since it’s concrete, it doesn’t push back like an actual springboard.
So does that extra little bounce actually do anything?
The trick is to convert forward speed into height and rotation. Think standing high jump vs running.
I still don’t get it. They don’t do an extra little hop in any other jumping sport. (Except triple jump and it’s not “extra” there.)
As a follow-on question, how come some forward dives have a running start and some don’t?
I think that on some dives, you have to run forward to make sure you are going to clear the platform.
Well, if you’re doing a dive with a lot of rolling and twisting, you’ll want as much height as you can get to perform the tricks (for lack of a better word) and manage to go into the water as close to vertical as you can manage. If you’re doing a simpler dive, you’ll have more room in which to do that. This probably also varies among individual divers; some can gain sufficient height from a standing jump, others need to run up. Finally, the requirement may vary from dive to dive, though I’m not sure about that one.