Chen Yuxi won the championship with Quan Hongchan 9.20 points in the championship, and the two competed again ten days later
On November 22, the 2023 National Diving Championships kicked off in Wuhan. This competition is also an important stop for the 2024 Doha World Tour and the 2024 Paris Olympic Games domestic trials, and the masters from the national diving team and the diving teams of various provinces and cities all came to the competition venue to compete for tickets to represent the Chinese team in the two major international events. On the first day of the competition, there was a competition in the women's 10-meter platform preliminaries and finals that diving fans are most concerned about, and the popular two little girls Quan Hongchan, Chen Yuxi, Olympic champion Zhang Jiaqi, world champion Lu Wei, Zhang Minjie, etc. all participated in the competition. After five rounds of competition in the final, Chen Yuxi finally won the women's 10-meter platform championship of this National Diving Championship with a high score of 436.80, and Quan Hongchan won the runner-up with a score of 427.60 points.
If there are no accidents in normal performance, Quan Hongchan and Chen Yuxi are the most likely candidates to represent the Chinese team in the women's singles and double 10m platform competitions in the two major events in the next year. In the competition for the international individual event Grand Slam, Quan Hongchan currently has a slight upper hand, because she is the champion of the Tokyo Olympics and the gold medalist of the Hangzhou Asian Games. Chen Yuxi has won the women's single 10m platform championship at the World Championships for three consecutive times, and she is also the champion of two consecutive diving World Cups. In the official competition after Quan Hongchan's debut, Chen Yuxi also won more and lost less than her.
A month and a half after the Hangzhou Asian Games, the women's 10-meter platform was ushered in in Wuhan. There is a popular saying in the field of table tennis and diving competition, called "it is easy to win the world championship and difficult to win the national championship", this is because the competitors of these two advantageous events in international competitions are mainly national team teammates, and in domestic competitions it is different, there are many participants with similar levels, and many of them have world level, which makes the competition intensify and the difficulty of winning the championship increases. At the same time, compared with the referees in the international arena, the scoring of domestic referees will be more "harsh", and it is not easy to jump out of super high scores.
Sure enough, in the preliminaries on the afternoon of the 22nd, Quan Hongchan's performance was quite normal, winning the first place with 415.50 points. The second place in the preliminaries was Zhang Jiaqi, a 19-year-old Beijing girl who won one of the gold medalists in the women's double platform at the Tokyo Olympics, with a score of 391.35 points, a certain gap from Quan Hongchan. Third in the preliminaries went to 18-year-old Sichuan champion Lu Wei of the Gwangju World Championships, who scored 388.35 points. The fourth in the preliminaries is Chen Yuxi, who only scored 56.10 points for a major mistake in the 207C (three and a half weeks of backward somersault and knee hugging) action, with a total score of 380.10, which shows that this second group of backward somersaults is quite difficult for many female players.
But in the final of the project that night, Chen Yuxi performed the same as her previous performances in many competitions, the preliminaries or semifinals were mediocre, but she began to exert her strength in the final. Quan Hongchan and Chen Yuxi in the first jump had the same movements, and their scores were exactly the same, both scoring 81.00 points. The two girls in the second jump still danced the same action 407C, and Quan Hongchan scored slightly higher in this jump, leading Chen Yuxi by 1.60 points. The third jump, although the two of them jumped arm standing movements, but they were slightly different, Chen Yuxi chose 626C (arm standing backward somersault for three weeks and hugging the knees), Quan Hongchan was 6243D (arm standing backward somersault for two weeks, and the body turned around for a week and a half). The completion of this jump was also excellent, Chen Yuxi's score was 2.55 points higher than Quan Hongchan's, and the total score jumped to the first place, with a lead of 0.95 points.
The penultimate jump is the victory or defeat of the two girls, 207C. Chen Yuxi, who played first, performed close to perfect, scoring a high score of 94.05, nearly 38 points higher than she did in the morning preliminaries. Quan Hongchan's jump was also good, with some minor flaws, and she scored 85.80 points, and the total score difference between the two widened to 9.20 points. The suspense is coming, and many viewers expect Quan Hongchan to achieve a Jedi reversal like in the final of the Hangzhou Asian Games. The final jump is the 5253B (two and a half weeks of backward somersault and one and a half years of twisting and one and a half bending), and everyone's choice is the same. Both played flawlessly, and both scored the same 91.20 points. But because Chen Yuxi was even better in the third jump, she won the championship with 436.80 points, and Quan Hongchan won the second place with 427.60 points.
Although the outcome was decided, it did not affect Quan Hongchan and Chen Yuxi to enter the selection list of the two major competitions of the national team, let alone their status higher than other players in the domestic project. On December 1, the second leg of the domestic trials for the World Championships will still be held in Wuhan, and the two will compete again in the single event after 10 days.
Text/Beiqing Sports Liu Ailin