Boudia & Johnson Advance to Men’s 10M Diving Semis

The preliminary men’s diving round off of the 10-meter platform went about as expected for both American (and Purdue) representatives on Friday. Both David Boudia and Steele Johnson finished in the top 18 out of 28 divers to advance to tomorrow’s semifinals. Their scores will be reset to zero and the top 12 out of the 18 semifinalists will advance to tomorrow evening’s finals after six more dives.

Boudia did the best with a cumulative score of 496.55 to finish fourth behind Tom Daley (the bronze medalist in London from Great Britain) and China’s Bo Qiu (the silver medalist in London) and Aisen Chen. All of David’s scores were over 86 except for a bad third dive that was only a 49.95. His fifth dive was his best, a 97.20. The only thing that really separated him from the top three was his third dive, as none of the top three had a dive worse than 80.50.

Johnson struggled a little more but finished in the final transfer spot of 18th. There may be some luck in that, as that is where Boudia finished in 2012 during the preliminary round before coming back to win the gold. His score was a 403.75, just 5.6 points ahead of Canada’s Maxim Bouchard. Johnson’s fourth dive was a really bad one at only 37.00. His best was his second at 86.40, but four of his six dives were 70.20 or lower.

Tomorrow’s semifinals are at 11am while the finals begin at 4:30pm