Australia’s Synchronised Dive Nightmare: The Horror of Choking

Paris 2024, the Australian women’s synchronised divers are neck and neck with the Americans heading into the final round. It looked set for Keeney and Smith to get an Olympic bronze medal. However, disaster struck.

The duo head into their final dive. As they’re heading to the tip of the springboard, Smith slips during her launch. She ends up diving towards her right unsynchronised with her partner. The crows falls silent.

She instantly knows what’s happened and is seen screaming underwater. This was followed up with tears pool side. A horrible turn of events for the Aussie. Silence struck at the games, it’s the harsh cruelty athletes face in sport, and everyone could feel it.

Smith in an interview talks about the dive. She is stoic and acknowledges the pain she felt. She speaks about what she can/cannot control and continues to say that this dive won’t define her. She showed that she has the mentality of an elite athlete and that she is worthy of her bronze medal achievement in Rio 2016. But many athletes have been in what feels like a nightmare scenario and would like to avoid it as much as they can.

Choking in Sport

It is hard to know what happens in an athlete’s mind, especially when watching them in a different country from the comfort of your home. However, this does look like Smith may have choked in the final round of the 3m Synchronised Springboard.

Choking in sport is when you suddenly perform a lot worse than normal when it is most important to perform to a high level. This can happen for several reasons, usually stemming from a level of nervousness around the event. But I want to talk to you about one reason in particular.

Too Much Focus

I know that sounds a little crazy, you can focus too much on something? Yes, how cruel. An athlete is potentially being punished for paying too much attention, all because they’re trying to perform.

Robert Gray, a psychologist, tested this. He took a group of excellent collegiate baseball players and asked them to swing at a moving ball. Whilst doing this, they were listening for out sounds. They had to judge whether they were high or low in tone as a distraction task. In this condition, the athlete’s baseball swings did not suffer, they swung at the ball like normal.

However, in a different task, these athletes didn’t do so well. They had to answer if their bat was moving up or down when the sound played whilst swinging for the ball. The quality of their swing dropped dramatically. Why? Because the secondary task forced them to direct their attention towards the swing itself. Their problem was not a lack of focus, but too much focus. Overly focused athletes disrupt the smooth operating system of their brains. It effectively makes them play as beginners again.

Maybe this is what happened to Smith. She is an excellent athlete and proved it in Rio 8 years ago. She has done that dive more times that she can count and probably rarely makes the mistake she made in the final round in Paris. Focusing too much may have been her undoing. Click here to learn more about choking and how to manage pressure.

Seeing that dive was painful and my heart goes out to her. I can’t wait to see the redemption arc that awaits her.

‘Experience is simply the name we give to our mistakes’

Oscar Wilde

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