Senior National Diving Title comes back to Plymouth
Plymouth Diving took a small team of 5 divers to Sandwell on June 5-8th for the Aquatics GB Diving Championships.
This competition also served as the trials for the World Championships this July in Singapore.
Up first were the four womens 1m divers, for some their first ever Senior Championships. Maia Pearson, Scarlett Colbourne and Katie Martin all came to the event with years of junior competition experience and were determined to confidently take on the senior challenge. Joining them was Amelie Underwood who has featured in the senior rankings before.
In the preliminary event they finished
Amelie 6th, Maia 7th, Scarlett 8th and Katie 10th.
In the final after a close battle Amelie edged herself into the top 6 and Maia only two points behind her finished 8th, Scarlett finished in 10th and Katie 11th. A good start to the week and plenty of experience gained.
Amelie stayed for day two where she dived in the 3m springboard event. Having already qualified for the Great Britain team attending the European Junior Championships at the end of June, in Athens, the British Championships was to be purely for competition experience and practice before flying out with the GB team.
Amelie had a great preliminary event and again finished in 6th and dropped slightly to 8th in the final with some things to work on before the European Junior Championships.
And so to the final day and Euan McCabe in Mens Platform.
To say Euans journey this far has been hampered, is an understatement. Back in February he fractured a foot bone and then spent 12 weeks in an air boot with limited opportunity to do any sort of training – and only in the dryland, not in the pool.
A mere three weeks ago he got the all clear from a second scan on the foot, and then attempted fairly scaled back training and was intending to go to Sandwell for training purposes only.
Once in Birmingham he decided to attempt his competition dives in order to test his fitness, with these going well he made the decision to compete.
From here he never looked back, using his lack of pressure to rack up some brilliant dives that were fuelled mostly by an enjoyment of being back on the board.
He finished first in the preliminary event having stormed into an impressive lead early on and into the final he only lost the lead once along the way. The final came down to the very last dive as he and Robbie Lee from London who also had the back twist dive to finish.
Both divers were deternined to win but Euan held on with 81 points to end the event and with 439 points total.
Within 24 hours he had the news he had qualified for his first World Championships and looks forward to a pre camp in Australia and then the Worlds in Singapore- Euan competes on the 2nd and 3rd August.
Many thanks to his coach Sally Freeman who said…..
‘Euan has had a bad run of luck with the injury, he missed out on the European Championships that he had qualified for in January but he used that disappointment to fuel the fire. With nothing to lose and everything to gain, he relaxed and pulled some quite miraculous diving together after 3 weeks back in training from 3 months injured. He thoroughly deserves his chance against the best in the World and Plymouth is very proud of him’.
