Diving Is Hot, So Hot

Last Wednesday Dave and I went to the Diving World Cup at the new Olympic Aquatics Center/re. I bought the tickets in January (?) and in that time Dave was asked to go to an event at the Apsley House (that big old house at Hyde Park corner) and to possibly go to Chicago for work. He said no to both. So was the diving worth it, should he have gone to Chicago? Well....

We took the tube out to Stratford and saw signs telling us to walk through the new Westfield to the Aquatics Center/re. There were people with those foam #1 hands you see at sporting events and they said to "follow the finger to the thumb," which made no sense. Until we saw the guy with a foam hand making the thumbs up sign, pointing us up the stairs. When we got to the center/re we had to go through a metal detector and once inside we were directed to seats on the upper lever. It was open seating, but they sort of ushered groups of people to various sections.

One thing I didn't know is how HOT the center/re is kept. They do that so divers, and I suppose swimmers, don't tighten up between their events. Since we were dressed for colder weather, it was a bit toasty in there. We did get the sense that almost every seat in the center/re will be perfectly fine for watching the Olympic events, especially swimming (assuming you are lucky enough to even get tickets to the Olympics, I mean come on). If you are seated on the opposite side of the diving pool and way up high it may be a bit hard to see the action, but the Olympic-sized swimming pool is so huge every seat has a great view of it.

We watched a lot of the warm up (a lot, we got there early) and then saw the men's 3m springboard final and later the women's synchronized 10m platform. The 10m platform is the super high one that looks so terrifying. And the fact that they go off it backwards only makes it more terrifying. Not for me. The competition consisted of 6 rounds, and each round took about ten minutes, so an hour per event. The synchro competition started with the first two rounds consisting of pikes and I guess backward pikes (not sure if that's the correct term). We left when the competition was hotting up, as they would say here, with the divers doing synchronized somersaults and twists. Overall the competition was fun to watch, I guess. However, diving isn't all that exciting. Sorry if you are a diver, but really, aside from seeing some cool twists and turns and pikes (not to mention women jumping off a freakishly high platform), it does get a teensy bit repetitive. Of course to spice it up you can spend the time looking at the male divers' bodies, as they are something. I did a lot of that, but slyly so Dave didn't get offended. Maybe the actual Olympic diving event will be more exciting just because it's the Olympics and that automatically makes the excitement more palatable (I imagine). But Dave did say that after watching diving he's looking forward to seeing Olympic ping pong because it will be so fast and really fun to watch. OK, maybe he didn't say "really fun," but he did say fast.