Ancient tomb frescoes showed divers five centuries before Christ
Sport diving launches athletes from platforms or springboards into water with gymnastic twists. Olympic recognition followed English plunging contests of the 1880s. Frescoes in the Tomb of Hunting and Fishing (~530–500 BCE) and Paestum's Tomb of the Diver (~500–475 BCE) already show cliff leaps.
The sport probably grew out of the dive at the start of swimming races. English sources record plunging distances from at least 1865, including a Mr. Young who covered 56 feet in 1870, and the plunging championship begun in 1883 ran until 1937. German and Swedish gymnasts had used water as a soft landing since the early 1800s, allowing higher jumps and more elaborate tricks, a style that became fancy diving, while the racing start became plain diving.
High diving took hold in England: stages 15 feet tall went up at Highgate Ponds in 1893, and the Royal Life Saving Society held a national graceful diving competition there in 1895. Swedish athletes Otto Hagborg and C. F. Mauritzi showed off acrobatics from a 10-metre board, inspiring the Amateur Diving Association in 1901, the world's first diving body. Plain diving entered the Olympics in 1904, fancy diving and springy boards followed in 1908, women competed from 1912, the two styles merged in 1928, and synchronised diving arrived in 2000. Dmitri Sautin won a record eight Olympic diving medals between 1992 and 2008.
Events use 1-metre and 3-metre springboards and platforms up to 10 metres, the height used at the Olympics and world championships. Judges mark takeoff, flight and entry, rewarding height, tight body position, a vertical entry and minimal splash, and the score is multiplied by a degree of difficulty. On seven-judge panels, the two highest and two lowest marks are thrown out to blunt any single judge's bias. Synchro panels, eleven strong at London 2012, weight timing heavily.
Divers must lodge their dive lists in advance, and performing anything other than the announced dive, even a harder one, earns zero. Elite athletes often place a confident dive just before their hardest one to steady their nerves.
Source: Diving (sport)
