Abel and Citrini-beaulieu pick up silver in synchro
Team comes back from sixth place after focusing on performance, not `fear'
Their specialty being synchronization, perhaps this shouldn't come as a surprise.
Canada's duo of Jennifer Abel and Melissa Citrini-beaulieu, having just come up clutch with a dive that would seal a silver medal, climbed out of the pool at Tokyo Aquatic Centre, wrapped their arms around each other for a hug and seemed to burst into tears at the exact same time.
Fitting.
Back home in Canada, anybody awake in the wee hours to watch this three-metre synchro springboard showdown may have needed a tissue too.
“It was a moment of, `We got it. We made it,' ” said Abel, a four-time Olympian who also has a bronze keepsake from London 2012. “It was a proud moment. It was an emotional moment, a relief.
The duo arrived in Tokyo with big expectations, but the Quebecers — Abel is from Laval and Citrini-beaulieu from Saint-constant — seemed a little shaky in the early stages of Sunday's final.
In fact, after the second of five dives, they were sitting sixth in the eight-team standings. That was especially notable, and potentially nerve-racking, if you know Abel's history.
At the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, she finished fourth in two events. Along with her former synchro sidekick, Pamela Ware, she missed the podium by less than one point in this same event — the damage done by costly errors on their simplest dives.
“Trust me, I did have some flashbacks,” admitted Mitch Geller, chief technical officer for Diving Canada.
Abel might have, too.
Now 29, she has been insistent that she's not trying to erase the memories of Rio but instead show how much she learned and ultimately benefited from her heartbreak in Brazil.
“I knew that in Rio, one of the biggest mistakes that I made is to focus on the medal,” Abel said. “It's more the performance that we gave and also the chemistry that we have. This is, I think, the most important thing that we wanted to have here coming up to the competition, and we did exactly what we wanted to do. We didn't let fear win.”