MITCHAM STARS ON ANOTHER DAY OF DIVING DRAMA

Matthew Mitcham has made no secret he’d like one day to make a career in the theatre – and he’s getting plenty of drama training in his current day job!

In fact the entire Australian team has put on a performance so far in Scotland worthy of any work Shakespeare could ever cobble together.

The crowning moment (so far) arrived on Friday night, with the unbridled excitement and exuberance on the Edinburgh pool deck when Mitcham finally ended his eight-year Commonwealth gold drought.

It was a moment for Australian diving; the experienced campaigner with his patched-up body, and his young apprentice, 19-year-old Domonic Bedggood, a diver with barely a nanosecond of experience but now a Commonwealth gold medal to his name.

The platform synchro final was set up perfectly. A small but star-studded field that included two of the biggest names in platform diving in recent years – Mitcham and Daley.

Adding to the intrigue, the Olympic gold medalists were both stepping out with relative newbies to the sport, divers who’d entered the sport idolising the divers they were now trying to partner to a gold medal.

Daley and James Denny struggled through the early stages, slipping back to last before the final dive. By contrast Mitcham and Bedggood were serviceable, hovering in the top two but struggling to nail that perfect dive that can define a competition.

It all changed in the final round. First Daley and Denny answered England’s prayers, executing a high-risk dive with near perfection that rocketed the duo from last to first.

It gave them a score a breath away from 400, and meant close enough would definitely not be good enough for Mitcham and Bedggood’s final dive.

In Beijing in 2008 Mitcham left his best to last, posting a gold-medal winning score considered one of the most perfect dives ever.

And in Edinburgh, staring down the barrel of a seventh Commonwealth Games silver, courage would be needed. From two, not one.

It wasn’t perfect, but it was good. Very good. Good enough to snatch gold, by less than a point.

Mitcham knew it. His clenched fist appeared from the water before he did, and the pool deck jig gave it away.

"I think I attach maybe a little bit more significance to this than what maybe other people might attach to a Commonwealth Games gold medal," Mitcham said later.

"I mean it’s special enough as it is but having come second so many times I was kind of almost resigned to the fact that maybe I was just going to have a whole collection of silvers.

"I did kind of set my expectation and kind of set the significance of it to be much higher than perhaps normal which kind of has a lot of risk associated with it.

"I think that’s why I might have jumped around a little bit ungraciously when it came up on the scoreboard that we’d actually won."

Earlier in the day Mitcham had clocked up his sixth silver medal, this time in the 3-metre synchro with Grant Nel.

As a result it was a triumph for the supremely talented Nel, coming just 24-hours after the heartbreak of the no jump in his signature event, the individual 3-metre.

Among the first to congratulate Mitcham and Bedggood was Perth teenager Maddison Keeney, who had found herself in a drama of her own just hours earlier.

Keeney is without a doubt one of the world’s best 1-metre divers, a fact acknowledged by commentators and fellow athletes on Friday night.

But her high risk strategy, while offering great rewards, is high risk. When she puts all her dives together, as she did in Melbourne at the Games qualifiers, gargantuan scores flow.

She can usually even afford to miss a dive and still get the scores to win most events. Her fourth dive on Friday night was exceptional. But unfortunately it was her second attempt.

Keeney had baulked at her first attempt when she felt her knee buckle. It meant an automatic two-point deduction from each score for that dive, dropping her from the top of the leaderboard to fifth.

24 hours earlier Grant Nel and Melissa Wu both showed enormous strengths of character to fight on from disappointment, and so it was for Keeney.

Her final dive had everyone gasping, and put her less than six points from Canadian Jennifer Abel’s gold medal. That only increased the despair for Keeney, who will win gold medals in the future.

Esther Qin, the top qualifier and an early leader in the final, finished strongly to grab bronze behind Abel and Keeney, but in doing so relegated 15-year-old Georgia Sheehan to fourth – by less than a point.

Sheehan’s performance was outstanding, and bodes well for Australia’s diving future.

If we can all withstand the drama!