Sensation from the debutante and silver with a touch of sadness: Russian divers won three medals at the European Championship

The fourth day of the European Aquatics Championships was the first truly significant day of the tournament, as it opened the competition in the Olympic disciplines. He brought Russian divers into the water joy where it was not expected, and a defeat that should not have happened.

In individual jumps from a ten-meter platform, the debutante of the national team Anna Konanykhina, who has the most difficult program, was 36.05 points ahead of the three-time European champion Yulia Timoshinina and won gold, which Russia has not had in this type of program at major continental championships since 2000 (formally it was even gold by Yulia Koltunova in 2009, but that tournament had a much less significant status than the complex forums on aquatic species). But in synchronized jumping from a three-meter springboard for men, where only victory or at least a fierce struggle for it was expected from Evgeny Kuznetsov and Nikita Schleicher, the Russian duo lost more than ten points to the Germans Patrick Hausdink and Lars Rüdiger.

Should we consider Konanykhina's victory a sensation? Probably yes: at the recent World Cup in Tokyo, the Petersburg woman became ninth, and in preliminary competitions in Budapest she showed only 11th result. That is, I risked not making it to the finals at all. However, super-difficult elements have specific features that cannot be ignored: if an athlete does not have much experience in performances, it takes him a lot of time to stabilize all jumps. Often a single mistake creates a "domino effect", and everything else begins to pour in, but if mistakes can be avoided, the athlete immediately gets a huge advantage over those whose programs are simpler.

In Budapest, the 16-year-old debutante has managed to tame sheer complexity.

Moreover: for two jumps out of five, she received "nines", which almost never happens in diving in relation to European divers.

One of the reasons for such an uncharacteristic generosity of judges was that before the final on the platform, the referees received significant reprimands for the fact that they were “unable to distinguish good from mediocre jumps,” as one of the participants in the proceedings put it.

The claim looked fair: during the women's final on the meter springboard, where 12 athletes performed five free jumps each, the panel of judges put forward a total of 420 marks, of which only five were higher than 7.5 points.

In sports that are difficult from a technical point of view, there are certainly tournaments where the refereeing turns out to be extremely tough, but in this case such stinginess was difficult to justify. Especially now, when there is very little time left before the Games in Tokyo. Translated from digital to human, the assessments meant that European athletes (from the point of view of the judges) were not able to jump well by default. Although, in fact, the difference between Europe and China is now practically leveled in terms of both complexity and skill.

The representatives of the Celestial Empire, interestingly, were served a disservice by the same refereeing: over the years, the Chinese were judged to such an extent "privileged" that they themselves stopped paying attention to such "trifles" as bent knees, loose socks and pulled apart in screw jumps legs - something for which athletes from other countries are severely punished. Why this is happening was exhaustively explained a year ago by the President of the Russian Federation of Diving Alexei Vlasenko.

“The technology is very simple: judges are selected for the Games on a four-year cycle. In all competitions, the FINA referees are supervised by a representative of the technical committee appointed by the liaison. As a rule, this is Chinese. If a judge gives a bad mark to someone from the Celestial Empire, his rating is slowly lowered. And it turns out that only those experts who judge Chinese jumpers as well as possible reach the Olympics. Perhaps next year we will be able to change this practice if at the next elections, which will be held in Tokyo before the Olympic Games, a representative of another country will take the liaison position in diving, ”Vlasenko said.

Whether something will change in Tokyo, or not, we have yet to see, but on Thursday, the performance of Kuznetsov and Schleicher in men's synchronized ski jumping caused desperate nostalgia for the times when Kuznetsov was paired with Ilya Zakharov and together with him seven times became champion of Europe, won the gold of the world championship in 2017 and the silver of the Olympic Games in London. At the 2021 World Cup in Tokyo, Evgeny and Nikita finished third, losing to the English and German duets, so the defeat of the Russians in Budapest by Hausding / Rüdiger looked already systemic. It was just right to be glad that the World Cup winners and recognized the strongest European synchronists Jack Lo / Daniel Goodfellow had completely flunked their program, having flown to sixth place. If this had not happened, most likely, Russia would not have had any silver in this form.

It is difficult to accept such a distressing fact: the duet of Kuznetsov and Schleicher developed after Zakharov was suspended from the competition for a year and a half in 2019 for a disciplinary violation - missing three doping tests. The new tandem was predicted to have a rather promising future, but Kuznetsov and Schleicher are still unable to achieve the harmony that has always distinguished Eugene and Ilya on the springboard. In other words, the main trump card, which for many years were considered men's synchronized ski jumping, could be out of the hands of Russia.

Synchronization is generally a very delicate matter in terms of partner selection. At one time, Russia already had an ideal duet in the form of two outstanding athletes - Dmitry Sautin and Alexander Dobroskok. Due to the conflict at the Games in Athens, the partners parted, after which Dmitry paired up with Yuri Kunakov and even managed to win Olympic silver with him at the 2008 Games. At the same time, everyone understood that Kunakov was far below the two-time Olympic champion in his abilities and thus, as it were, forced him to slightly restrain the amplitude of his own jumps, so that the difference in class would not be too conspicuous.

Kuznetsov and Schleicher have a different story.

When athletes have such strong personalities and leadership qualities, they are not always able to adapt to each other.

In addition, Schleicher equally specializes in jumping from a 10-meter platform (on this apparatus he several times won European championships, both individually and in sync), and it is extremely difficult to "cross" a high-jumper and a trampoline jumper.

However, in Budapest, the divers have six more finals in the Olympic disciplines ahead, so both Kuznetsov and Schleicher will have the opportunity to rehabilitate themselves.