KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — Olympic hopefuls are in Knoxville this week as the University of Tennessee hosts the 2023 Diving Winter National Championships.
The event serves as an opportunity for some of the best divers in the world to qualify for the Olympic Diving Trials and give them a chance to familiarize themselves with UT's aquatic facilities ahead of next year's event.
The best divers will have a chance to move on to the World Aquatics Championships in Doha, Qatar next year -- which is the final chance for countries to secure quota spots for the 2024 Paris Olympics.
Top-level divers are competing for a spot on Team USA's elite roster, which was made up of 11 divers in the Tokyo Olympics.
The winter competition is held at the Allan Jones Intercollegiate Aquatic Center. You can find a schedule of events at this link.
Knoxville will be the gateway to the 2024 Paris Olympics for Team USA's divers. The winter championships are just a taste of what's to come when UT hosts the 2024 U.S. Olympic Diving Trials next year, which will begin in June 2024.
It will be the first time Knoxville holds the U.S. Olympic Diving Trials. The 2024 event will showcase the best America's divers have to offer before the Paris Olympics, making it will be a must-see for diving fans.
The Winter National Championships started with practice on Monday and the full event is expected to last through Dec. 6. People wanting to attend can learn more and purchase tickets at this link.
The event begins earnest with the first round of qualifiers, which begin on Nov. 28 and run through Nov. 30. Men and women will compete in individual 1-meter, 3-meter and 10-meter dives for a chance to advance to prelims, which will begin on Saturday, Dec. 2 for the individual events. You can find a full schedule of competitions here.
In order to advance to the championships, participants have to achieve a minimum score under a minimum degree of difficulty. You can find the qualifying standards for the Winter Nationals below.
Here's how Olympic-level diving scores generally work. Divers pick a set lest of dives they want to perform, and those dives are given a difficulty rating. That difficulty rating is used as a multiplier -- so the more difficult a dive is to execute, the more points the diver can potentially earn for performing it successfully. There's a lot of risk-reward strategy to diving similar to performance sports like ice skating and gymnastics because more complex dives are easier to mess up. There is also a lot that goes into determining the degree of difficulty rating when picking dives, which you can learn more about at this link from NBC Olympics
In the Olympics, male divers perform six rounds of different dives and female divers perform five rounds of dives. For individual events, a panel of 7 judges score each dive based on starting position, take-off, flight and entry into the water. After the dive, the top two and bottom two scores are removed, and the middle three scores are then added together and multiplied with the degree of difficulty rating for that dive to give the diver their total score. The gold medal goes to the diver with the highest overall combined score across all their dives.
Diving is one of the more unforgiving Olympic sports. A single error can end the dreams of even the best athletes. Top-level divers across the world have to perform at near-perfection, or in some cases actual perfection in the eyes of the judges.
In the past 120 years, Team USA has held on to its status as the strongest country when it comes to Olympic diving with 49 gold medals and 141 total medals since 1904. Team USA was nearly unbeatable in diving between the 1920s and 1960s and in some years won all the medals in several diving events during this period.
However, China has gained a tremendous amount of ground in the past 30 years and its divers have practically dominated most diving events since the late 1980s. The China Olympic Diving Team is just three gold medals away from overtaking Team USA in the all-time gold medal count since 1904, meaning Team USA Diving will be defending its status as the world's best in Paris.
It's been more than a decade since Team USA won a gold medal in diving. David Boudia was the last U.S. Olympian diver to win the gold, which happened at the 2012 London Olympics in the 10-meter platform event.