It was a brilliant start byWaterfield, who had clearly got over the disappointment of missing out on the synchro 10m title on Thursday (February 23) alongside Tom Daley.

His first dive earned near perfect marks from the judges and catapulted him to the top of the leaderboard, ahead of Chinese favourites Bo and Yue Lin.

In the second round, Waterfield (pictured below) was unable to repeat that impressive score and reigning World champion Bo took advantage with a slightly less accomplished, but still solid dive to take the lead.


Mexico's German Sanchez moved into second whilst Bo's compatriot Lin found himself in third place at the end of the second round.

Bo then pulled off probably the best dive of the week scoring full marks from all judges bar one, who gave him 9.5 to pull further clear.

There was no catching the 19-year-old, but the race for second was exciting, with David Boudia of the United States and Ukraine's Oleksandr Bondar both performing impressively as they threatened to take medals.

In the end though it was Russia's Minibaev who came second, a reward for his consistency throughout all six dives.

It was a superb penultimate dive from Waterfield that sent the crowd wild though, before an even better final dive brought huge roars of appreciation.

Unusually for the Chinese, there was disappointment as a poor last dive from Lin ruined his medal hopes, but at the same time ensured that Waterfield would pick up at least a silver, before Bo's predictably brilliant final effort meant the Briton left with a bronze.

Despite the near perfect score, having picked up 574.90 points, Bo played down his achievements afterwards, telling insidethegames: "I feel happy, but I made mistakes during the competition so I will come back and look at those and try to improve for future competitions.

"I've been quite steady during training in China and today was a better performance [than that].

Bo is looking forward to the Olympics and a chance to add to his growing medal collection, describing it as "a dream for every athlete [to compete]".

Silver medallist Minibaev said: "I have to get rid of some small mistakes and perfect my performance... I'm very happy to have defeated one Chinese diver [Lin]!"

Speaking after picking up the bronze, Britain's first 10m platform medal of the World Cup, Waterfield praised the crowd, saying that without them: "I wouldn't have been on the rostrum tonight.

"It's amazing.

"Tonight the crowd definitely helped me on my way, I knew that if I got into the final I could try and put pressure on.

"They [the Chinese] are not invincible...you can use a home crowd to your advantage and you've got to dive well to get that home crowd screaming and shouting, and that's what I did."


The final event of the week saw the Chinese complete a clean sweep of all the gold medals in the women's synchro 3m springboard.

The pair of Zi He and Minxia Wu (both pictured above) clinched gold, with Canada's Jennifer Abel and Emilie Heymans taking silver, whilst Italy's Tania Cagnotto and Francesca Dallape won bronze.

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