USA Diving Championships: Women’s 3-Meter Synchro Ends in Tie
The women’s 3-meter synchronized competition at the USA Diving Championships on Sunday was literally too close to call, with the gold medals split between the top two pairs.
The pairing of Anna Kwong and Sophie Verzyl, and the pair of Lily Witte and Bailey Sturgill both scored 534.12 points to earn the title. Kwong and Verzyl were ahead of the pack in the prelim/quarterfinal with 267.54 points, just under 15 points ahead of Witte and Sturgill.
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Kwong and Verzyl had just the fifth-best dive of the second round, which got Witte and Sturgill within 10 points. The chasing pairing delivered the highest-scoring dive of each of the last four rounds, slowly chipping away. They scored 66.36 on the final dive, with Kwong and Verzyl scoring 64.80 to exactly level the scores.
“I don’t think there’s any words that can really describe how this feels,” Sturgill told USA Diving. “I mean, hitting the water after our last dive, I knew we needed to go big, and it was just a great feeling knowing we did that. Then they hit big. This is how it was meant to be.”
“I think we definitely knew we needed to hit it. After seeing them go, I definitely felt a little bit of nerves, but we just did what we had to do,” Verzyl said. “It feels kind of weird, but I’m happy that’s it’s them because we love them. We were literally sitting next to them the whole event just joking around. I wouldn’t want to be up there with anyone else.”
Taylor Fox and Hailey Hernandez finished third with a score of 515.88. Kyndal Knight and Krysta Palmer, who were third after quarterfinals, fell to fifth in the final.
There was no such drama in the men’s platform synchro, with Carson Tyler and Joshua Hedberg running away from the field. They scored 818.91 points, nearly 150 points ahead of the field of four pairings. Second was Maxwell Weinrich and Dash Glasberg with a score of 672.66.