On the evening of August 6, Beijing time, the women's 10-meter platform final of the Paris Olympics was staged at the Paris Water Sports Center. The 17-year-old Chinese player Quan Hongchan successfully defended her title with 425.60 points, becoming the third Chinese diving team to win the gold medal in the Olympic Games after Fu Mingxia at the 1992 Barcelona and Atlanta 1996 Olympic Games, and Chen Ruolin at the 2008 Beijing and 2012 London Olympic Games. Another Chinese player, 18-year-old Chen Yuxi, won the silver medal with 420.70 points. The gold and silver medals all belong to the Chinese diving "dream team"!
The top two in this event were swept by the Chinese diving team, which was completely expected. Judging from the performance of the two little girls in the preliminaries and semifinals, Quan Hongchan is favored by more people. In the two final rehearsals on the afternoon and evening of August 5, Quan Hongchan's score was almost identical, while Chen Yuxi's five-jump action showed some fluctuations, Quan Hongchan led Chen Yuxi by 39.10 points and 18 points respectively, and Chen Yuxi's score in the preliminaries rarely failed to reach 400 points. Although her score in the semifinals has improved greatly, her score of 403.05 is not ideal.
In the finals, Quan Hongchan still had a slight upper hand, in the first action 107B, Quan Hongchan scored a perfect score of 90.00, and Chen Yuxi scored 82.50 points. Since then, Quan Hongchan has been leading, even if she was chased by Chen Yuxi after the third action to only 1,60 points, Quan Hongchan did not panic, completely according to her own rhythm, and finally won with an advantage of 4.90 points and won the gold medal for a second time.
So far, since the Tokyo Olympics, Quan Hongchan and Chen Yuxi have competed in the women's 10-meter platform finals in domestic and international competitions 16 times, Quan Hongchan has won 6 of them, Chen Yuxi has won 10 times, and in the 16 various competitions that the two have played together, the champion and runner-up have never been left behind. Comparatively speaking, Chen Yuxi has won more times, but Quan Hongchan has a higher gold content to win the championship. Chen Yuxi has won two World Championships, one World Cup, two World Cup finals, two World Cup sub-tournaments, and three national competitions. Quan Hongchan won two Olympic Games, one World Championships, one World Cup sub-station, and the Asian Games and the National Games.
Since the Tokyo Olympics final jumped the world and created the world's highest score in the women's 10-meter platform with a score of 466.20, Quan Hongchan said that she was at the peak of her debut, but she has also gone through a tortuous road in the past three years. At the Tokyo Olympics, her 207C (three and a half weeks of backward somersault and knee hugging) was close to a perfect score, but in later training and competitions, this movement Quan Hongchan often could not master perfectly, and there would always be various flaws, which affected her performance of the whole set of movements. In two consecutive World Championships, she lost to teammate Chen Yuxi in the final, and also achieved Chen Yuxi's three consecutive World Championships. Judging from the robustness of the overall five movements, Chen Yuxi is always more trustworthy, which is related to the growth experience, age, development and other factors of the two.
In the women's 10-meter platform final of the World Championships in Doha at the beginning of this year, Quan Hongchan finally overcame the demon that the finals were not as good as the preliminaries and semi-finals in the previous competitions, and won a high score of 436.25 with a near-perfect performance, winning the women's singles 10-meter platform championship at the World Championships for the first time, completing an important piece of the puzzle in the grand slam.
Comparing the movements of the two, in terms of absolute diving talent, Quan Hongchan is superior, which is an indisputable fact. Her body is lighter, her entry into the water is better, and her aerial posture is also unique in grace and standard, this little girl was born to dive. Even if it is a difficult action, Quan Hongchan can maintain the beauty of the leg flip, and the visual effect is obviously higher than the leg flip of other players, and the layman audience can also feel it, so it is loved by more people. Chen Yuxi is more stable, since her debut, no matter in the international and domestic arenas, she has never made a big mistake, which makes the audience feel unusually down-to-earth. Chen Yuxi's general demeanor does not match his actual age, and he is worthy of coming from a sports family.
After the women's peak showdown at the Paris Olympics, Quan Hongchan's total number of individual Olympic gold medals reached 3, while Chen Yuxi won 2. But Quan Hongchan is still one title away from the perfect Grand Slam in the strict sense, that is, the champion of the World Cup (now the World Cup Finals), in the one World Cup she participated in and the two World Cup finals after the restructuring, Quan Hongchan lost to Chen Yuxi three times. Of course, the World Cup is held every year, and Quan Hongchan has many chances to win three major majors. Once Quan Hongchan wins the championship, she will become the third Grand Slam player to win gold medals in the Olympics, World Championships and World Cup. The previous two winners were United States star Wilkinson and Quan Hongchan, and now head coach Chen Ruolin. In addition, Quan Hongchan has also won the National Games championship and the Asian Games championship, so she has really become a unique Grand Slam athlete (Chen Ruolin has not won the Asian Games gold medal). Chen Yuxi is just four years away from the all-important Olympic gold medal at the Grand Slam.
Text/Beiqing Sports Liu Ailin