Matthew Mitcham of Australia captured the men’s 10m platform diving gold, compiling a total of 537.95 points thanks to his high degree of difficulty. Matthew, who had begun as a trampolinist, only started professional diving training in 2001 and in eight years times, he has performed a miracle at the Water Cube.

Though Zhou Luxin, the silver winner from China boasts good entry work thus retaining a high score before the final dive, he made a glitch in his last attempt. This, coupled with his low degree of difficulty compared to Matthew’s and the latter’s perfect last attempt, led to his narrow loss of the gold medal.

Conversely, China’s Huo Liang lost the bronze to the Russian athlete due to the latter’s better entry work though with moderate degree of difficulty. Looking at Zhou and Huo’s performance at the just ended Olympic competition, it occurs to me that China will face a hard possibility of getting no platform medal in the men’s event at all at the 2010 London Games, if the Chinese team do not improve their stability, degree of difficulty, and psychological maturity.

The diving story of Zhou Luxin, still a student with only half the time of training of the professional athletes, is sort of dramatic. I picked him accidentally in central China’s Anhui Province when I was instructed by the country’s swimming center to form a diving team there in 1998. I was to choose among 300 children for the would-be team but only to find none of them was up to my standard. It was at that moment I found ten-year-old Zhou doing gymnastics training. Indeed, I took much trouble to take him back since his gymnastics coach then was reluctant to let him shift to diving. I promised to make an excellent athlete of him.

Zhou has started from zero in diving when I first taught him after I brought him back to Tsinghua. But within less than two years, he took two gold medals in platform diving events at the 6th Pan-Pacific Student Games held in Sydney, which was his first competition. With two of his dives scoring 10, his name appeared in the headlines of the major newspapers in Sydney. I told him then our ultimate goal was to score 10 in the 2008 Olympic Games. Unfortunately, our goal failed to come true.

In Tsinghua Diving Team, members receive academic as well as diving training, with four to five hours for training and the rest of school time for academic study. Scientific training methods are needed to train the athletes into excellent players. As for Zhou, within less than four years he has emerged as a strong competitor in games both home and aboard. His fast growth as a diver illustrates both the possibility and effectiveness of the scientific method to train high level players within a short period and the gift of the seed athletes. Now, Zhou has become a top diver within the Chinese men’s platform team, being crowned the 2006 world champion after Tian Liang.

Zhou, a one-parent child, is also a helpful and optimistic boy excelling in academic studies besides diving. Though, he missed the gold medal at the Beijing games, the strong youth will strive harder in the future. I hope him to grow well both in diving career and life in general. And I’ll wait to see his success.

http://yufenblog.blog.sohu.com/98050300.html