Abel and Rinaldi fourth on three-metre synchro at world aquatic championships

July 24th, 2009

Melanie Rinaldi & Jennifer Abel

ROME – Even hours after the end of the competition, Jennifer Abel of Laval, Que., and Melanie Rinaldi of Montreal were still agonising over the small mistakes that eventually cost them the bronze medal in the women’s three-metre synchro diving event on Friday at the world aquatic championships.

The first-year pair took fourth spot with 309.90 points finishing 0.9 points behind third place finishers Julia Pakhalina and Anastasia Pozdniakova of Russia. Jingjing Guo of China earned her 10 th career world title partnering with Wu Minxia for the victory with 348.00. Tania Cagnotto and Francesca Dallape of Italy were second at 329.70.

“It hurts quite a bit to leave here without the medal,” said Rinaldi, who completed the best year of her career at age 29. “I would have preferred a fifth place than a fourth. Still we learned this season that we have the potential to do very well in the future. The biggest challenge for us is the synchronization. We can do the tough dives individually.”

Abel felt it was a strong result considering the pair joined forces only three months ago.

“It’s going very well and our future looks very bright,” said Abel, 17. “All of our individual dives were very well done. We need to work on our synchronization and even out our distance from the board on take-off.”

The preliminaries were held in the men’s synchronized tower. Riley McCormick of Victoria and Reuben Ross of Regina qualified fifth for Saturday’s final, only three points out of third spot at 423.72. They bettered their previous best score by 30 points.

Liang Huo and Yue Li of China lead at 480.06, Patrick Hausding and Sascha Klein of Germany are second at 447.24 and Joe Guerra and Jeinkler Aguirre of Cuba are third at 427.38.

“We dove great today and we’re pretty excited about the final,” said Ross, a bronze medallist last Saturday on three-metre synchro with Alexandre Despatie. ‘’We’re a bit surprised. But this was the first list in which we dove together and neither of us missed a dive at all.’’

On-line: http://www.diving.ca/english/html/events/2009/WC09.htm

About the 13th World Aquatic Championships
The 13th FINA World Aquatic Championships will take place July 17th to August 2nd, 2009 in Rome, Italy.In total, 2556 athletes from 185 countries will be competing in swimming, diving, water polo, synchronized swimming, and open water swimming. This 2009 edition of the championship is the biggest one in history. The previous mark was set in 2007 in Melbourne when 2158 athletes represented 167 countries.

In diving, 200 athletes from 43 nations will face-off in the ten events taking place between July 17th and 25th at Foro Italico in
Rome.A total of 400,000 spectators are expected to attend and watch the ‘best of the best’ in world aquatics.

The FINA World Championships began in Belgrade (YUG) in 1973 and had the participation of 696 athletes from 47 countries.

About Diving Plongeon Canada
Diving Plongeon Canada (DPC) was established in 1967 as a not-for-profit organization to promote the growth and awareness of the sport in this country. As a member of FINA, the world’s governing body of aquatic sports, DPC contributes to the development of globally accepted standards of excellence in diving and supports the rules and regulations of international competition. Representing nine provincial diving associations, 67 local diving clubs and close to 4,000 high performance athletes, DPC shares a national commitment to advance the art and sport of diving and to position Canada as the number one diving nation of the world.  For information, visit www.diving.ca.

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