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SAINT-DENISE, France (AP) — Cao Yuan successfully defended his men’s 10-meter platform title on Saturday, giving China an unprecedented sweep of diving golds at the Paris Olympics.
The “Big Red Machine” won all eight gold medals at the Olympic Aquatics Center, most of them by landslides.
But this was not the case in the diving final of this Olympics. As teammate Yang Hao performed exceptionally poorly and Japanese player Tamai Rikuto kept putting pressure on his opponent before his diving error in the penultimate round, the burden of completing the home run fell entirely on Cao Wenxuan’s thin shoulders.
He is up to the task.
Cao, 29, secured the gold medal with a high score in the most difficult diving move of the competition. He completed a quadruple somersault in the sixth round and finally scored 547.50 points, becoming the first male diver to win two consecutive gold medals in the big tower diving since Greg Louganis in 1988.
Cao Wenxuan has won four gold medals so far in his career. He also won the springboard gold medal at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics and the 10m double gold medal at the 2012 London Olympics.
Tamai rebounded strongly in the final jump to secure the silver medal with 507.65 points. Britain’s Noah Williams won the bronze medal with 497.35 points.
Yang Tao already has a gold medal in this Olympics, having won the synchronized diving title with Lian Junjie in the opening week of the competition.
Cao and Yang tied for first and second in the morning semi-finals, but Yang performed poorly after the second round of diving, with only one outstanding performance in the entire diving process, and finally ranked last in the 12-person final.
But Cao ensured China remained on top of the medal podium, making China the first nation to win all eight gold medals since diving was expanded from four to eight at the 2000 Sydney Olympics.
China has won seven of the eight gold medals three times, but never all eight.
Until Saturday.
The last time a team swept all the Olympic gold medals was the United States in 1952, when they won all four gold medals at the Helsinki Winter Olympics.
In fact, Yujing narrowly edged out Cao Wenxuan on her second jump — the second time in the entire meet that a Chinese diver or pair wasn’t in the top spot at the end of a round.
Cao took the lead again in the third round, and after the fourth set of dives, he still led by just 2.75 points. But Yujing over-rotated on his next dive—actually his easiest of the very difficult events—and a huge cloud of water gushed out of the pool as he disappeared beneath the surface.
There were groans from the audience. Yujing’s hopes of a gold medal were basically dashed after a score of 3.5 to 4.0.
The United States once dominated diving, but China came to prominence after winning its first gold medal at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. Since 2000, the Asian powerhouse has won an astonishing 46 of the 56 diving gold medals awarded.
Due to the restriction that teams can only have two divers in individual events, China won gold in the women’s platform and silver in the men’s springboard. Before Yang Jia’s poor performance, the only misstep was Chang Yani finishing behind Australia’s Madison Keeney in the women’s springboard, where she took bronze.
China finished with 11 medals, just one shy of its record total from the Tokyo Olympics. The only other country to win 12 diving medals in a single Olympics was the United States in 1932, when it swept all four events at the Los Angeles Games.
The Americans won just one medal, a silver for Sarah Bacon and Cassidy Cook in the women’s synchronized 3-meter springboard, their worst performance at an Olympics since failing to win a medal in Beijing in 2008.
The United States has won a total of 10 medals in the past three Olympic Games.
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