Dubai: China claimed two more gold medals on the second day of diving events at the Asian Swimming Championships here on Friday.
Picking up from where his team mates left off the day before, Zhou Xin topped the podium in the men’s 3m springboard final with a points total of 480.25. Despite an under-par performance on his fifth round dive (an inward 3.5 somersault tuck), Zhou led the competition throughout the six rounds to emerge a worthy winner.
Malaysia’s Tze Liang-ooi claimed silver with a total of 440.50 points and Hong Kong’s Xie Zhen the bronze with 420.75. This was Tze’s second silver medal of the competition so far, having claimed second spot with partner Chew Yiwei in the 3m synchro event yesterday.
China’s other gold medal of the day came in the women’s 10m synchro final, in which 14-year-olds Xing Yiying and Wang Wenna emerged champions. Xing was a silver medallist in Thursday’s individual 10m platform behind teammate Wu Shengping. But on Friday the total of 315.21 she amassed with partner Wang was enough for gold. Japan’s Yuka Mabuchi and Fuka Tatsumi took silver with 240.72 and Zhiayi Loh and Hoong Cheong-jun of Malaysia the bronze with 230.82 points.
The Malaysians outscored the field with their first dive, but could not maintain the consistency to keep them in top spot.
“Actually we were hoping for a silver today but we had fun and enjoyed the competition,” said Hoong afterwards.
“The Chinese divers’ degree of difficulty is higher than ours and we were just doing our fixed dives for every dive, so it is tough to compete with them,” added Hoong, who will also compete in the 3m synchro and individual 3m events.
“We’re excited for those competitions and we’ll try to do as well as we can. We’ll just try to be more optimistic for the next events and hopefully get the silver.”
