Water again turns to gold for Team GB
Kayaker and synchronised divers take first golds since Adam Peaty – and 108-year wait over in gymnastics
TEAM GB’s Rio 2016 gold rush was well and truly under way last night after historic victories for kayaker Joe Clarke and synchronised divers Chris Mears and Jack Laugher.
Clarke, 23, kick-started GB’s quest for Olympic gold with a superb victory in the K1 slalom event, the country’s first in the sport since 2004. Barely an hour later, Mears and Laugher stunned the crowds at the diving centre with a barnstorming display in the three-metre springboard final to win Britain’s first ever diving gold medals.
GB’s brilliant night continued when gymnast Max Whitlock took bronze in the men’s individual all-around contest, Britain’s first medal in the six-discipline event since 1908.
Whitlock, 23, who is also favourite to take gold next week on the pommel horse, said he is being spurred on to more success after asking his girlfriend to marry him.
He said: “I wanted to prove myself as an all-rounder ... to come third was brilliant because it makes me relax. I feel like I can perform here and it’s boosted my confidence.
“I spoke to my girlfriend, well fiancée, before going out there. She just said good luck and do your stuff. It’s what I wanted to hear.” Earlier, there were bronze medals for cyclist Chris Froome, Steve Scott in shooting and judoka Sally Conway, after overnight silver medals in the pool for SiobhanMarie O’Connor and the men’s 4x200m relay team, bringing GB’s medals tally to 12.
With 11 days to go, Team GB is now already a quarter of the way towards its overall target of 48 medals, which would make Rio the team’s best ever Games on foreign soil. GB now stand 9th in the medal table, with one more gold than at the same stage in 2012.
Mears’s story is one of the most inspiring of the Games: seven years ago the 23-year-old was given only a five per cent chance of survival after rupturing his spleen during a diving contest, and when he pulled through he was told he would never dive again.
Refusing to be beaten, he was back in competition 18 months later and last night he said: “I’ve come from death’s door to here so I’m pretty proud.”
The divers had to battle against steady rain and wind in the open-air diving pool but Laugher, 21, joked that “we enjoy it in the rain, with the wind and the clouds, it’s English weather isn’t it?”
The best friends, who share a flat in Leeds, pulled off a 3.9 difficulty dive – the highest possible difficulty rating – to overtake the all-conquering Chinese towards the end of the competition.
Joe Clarke is the first “legacy” athlete of London 2012 to win Olympic gold, after spending the past four years training at the whitewater centre in the Lee Valley in Hertfordshire that was built for the 2012 Games.
His inspiration is a signed photograph of Sir Steve Redgrave, on which the rower had written “no stone unturned”.
Clarke said after winning gold: “I’ve never met him in person but I’ve actually just done a radio interview and they got Steve on the line and it was amazing to hear from him. Hopefully, I’m going to meet him. And, yeah, I left no stone unturned out there today.”
Clarke, who started kayaking with the Scouts as a boy, has been competing since the age of 11.
Sally Conway said she felt “absolutely amazing” after her bronze medal in the 70kg judo contest, and did not rule out an Olympic return at Tokyo 2020.
The 29-year-old, from Bristol, said: “I am so happy I can’t even put it into words at the moment.”
Steve Scott found himself in a bronze medal shoot-off against his friend and team-mate Tim Kneale in the men’s double trap event.
He said: “There is a little part of me that wanted him to win as well because we worked so hard together.”
With the first finals in track cycling and rowing to come today, and athletics still to begin, 2012 gold medallist Victoria Pendleton has predicted the golden run will continue.