AUSTRALIA’S MILLS AND QIN UNDERLINE OLYMPIC POTENTIAL

Australia’s Esther Qin and Samantha Mills have once again underlined their Olympic medal credentials, with a hard-fought win in the springboard synchro final at the FINA Diving Grand Prix on the Gold Coast.

Mills and Qin, who won bronze at this year’s World Championships, finished just over one point ahead of the highly rated Chinese pair, Lin Qu and Han Wang.

“It’s definitely a great feeling to have a great synchro partner that understands everything I have, and is always helping me and pushing us to our best,” Mills said.

“I thought the Chinese were always going to be in front of us, I didn’t really want to look at the score.

“I just really wanted to have our first competition back after worlds, and just have fun with it. When I saw we were one point ahead, I thought yeah, we’ll take that.”

Qin said despite living in different cities, she and Mills have worked well together as a team.

“This year we’ve done a very good job, we’ve been consistent and got great experience. We’ll keep pushing ourselves,” Qin said.

Qin also picked up a silver medal in the individual springboard final, finishing 20 points behind China’s Han Wang.

Australia’s Maddison Keeney once again underlined her enormous potential, finishing with bronze despite having a baulk on one of her dives.

The baulk cost her two points, but she bounced back from last to grab a solid third.

Australia’s other medals on the final day came from Commonwealth Games gold medalists, Domonic Bedggood and Matthew Mitcham, who finished third behind Germany’s Sascha Klein and Patrick Hausding in the men’s platform.

And Mitcham and Qin teamed up to win silver behind Malaysia in the 3-metre mixed synchro.

The most outstanding performance of the competition came in the men’s platform final, where just .05 separated two Chinese divers.

Zigan Huang and Xiaohu Tai both returned scores over 500, but despite a massive 102 points from his fourth dive, Tai had to settle for silver.

Huang finished on 511.70, with Tai notching up 511.65.

China finished the Grand Prix on top of the leaderboard, with five gold medals and three silver, with Australia second with two gold, three silver and three bronze.