So, I watched womens synchronized diving last night and without any expertise in this sport, easily figured out that the Chinese would walk off with gold and none of the other teams would be close. How did I know this?
The Chinese women were practically exact duplicts, same height, weight and body type. Every other team had divers of varying body types. The Canadians had one women who had legs like a figure skater, while the other was shaped more like a gymnist. The American divers were different heights.
Can’t these other teams figure out that different types of bodies, regardless of technique, with their mass spread out differently will spin at different rates?
You’re not wrong. However, in the case of the Chinese team, they were taken from their parents in early childhood and put into a diving program, and matched up BECAUSE they were the best divers who were also the same size.
In the case of the other teams, the competitors are generally self-selecting. The state isn’t making people into national property.
Damned freedom of choice! Good point, that just hadn’t occurred to me. I was speculating on how partners choose each other and started thinking about, of all things, “Blades of Glory”. Yikes!
I did notice what appeared to be weights on a male divers wrists the other night, and figured it was to help synch up rotations and whatnot with his larger partner.
Yes, I’m guessing that in the US (and other countries), it’s tough to find a good partner for a sport like that. In China, you let someone find the right person for you. And you can be sure they will!
I, too, was struck by how alike the Chinese divers were. You could hardly tell them apart.
Do the same divers compete in synchronized and other events? If you place a low priority on the synch event, you might just pick the best divers for all of the others, who will probably end up varying from each other.
Seems like a larger diver would want to tuck tighter to decrease his second moment of area to one equal to his partners. This would be similar to an ice skater bringing their arms in to spin faster. I don’t know if different tuck tightnesses would affect judging.
Another factor is that you need to train together for sync diving. American divers generally train wherever their coach is. I imagine Chinese divers train where they are told to train.
Agreed, but I would substitute “couch potato” for “gymnast”. The female diving commentator tactfully described the Canadian team as being “less streamlined” than the Chinese. The judges might not be sizest per se, but as they deduct for large splashes, the bigger girls tend to get penalized anyway.
You’d think that if anything, good synchronicity in a physically mismatched team would be rewarded in the marks for presumably higher difficulty. But since when has Olympic judging been transparent and reasonable?
Well, that team came in 4th in the 2007 championships (which got Canada into the Olympics in this event), ahead of the Americans and the Mexicans, so I’d guess it’s not a huge problem.
On the BBC the other night the sync diving expert was saying that synchronization during the fall is immaterial. What matters is that they enter the water simultaneously, in a clean fashion. I guess they have to do all the in-air manoeuvres that they said they were going to do, but the point was that while plummeting towards the pool it doesn’t matter if they rotate out of sync.