Eight years in the past, Jack Laugher appeared at his first Commonwealth Video games as a precocious 19-year-old, exploding on to the world stage with two gold medals at Glasgow 2014. He’s 27 now, an achieved veteran who has confronted quite a few obstacles.
But he continues to triumph. After a timid begin, Laugher’s kind exploded within the second half of the boys’s 1m springboard to assist him clinch his third consecutive Commonwealth Video games gold medal, his seventh medal total. Because the veteran Li Shixin of Australia completed with silver, England’s Jordan Houlden took a superb bronze in his first Commonwealth Video games.
It was removed from straightforward. Laugher had struggled within the preliminary spherical within the afternoon, feeling his nerves as he certified in fourth place. He arrived within the last below critical stress from 34-year-old Li, a two-time world champion.
But when the stress was at its highest, Laugher soared. Houlden led early on, choosing the tactic of throwing down his most troublesome dives first and nailing them to ascertain an early lead. However within the second half, Laugher distanced himself from the pack. For his fourth dive, he spectacularly executed his inverted two and a half piked somersault, the toughest dive in his arsenal, which moved him to first place. Having reached the highest, Laugher refused to relinquish his gold medal.
He completed spectacularly, slamming down his last two dives and incomes an infinite rating of 447 factors – simply 10 factors larger than the ever-consistent Li. “At this time I used to be pushed,” mentioned Laugher.
“It was a big-scoring competitors, in all probability the best-scoring competitors we’ve ever had on the Commonwealth Video games. Some nice performances by everyone and I’m actually completely happy to share the rostrum with Jordan.”
Laugher’s success is much more significant given the struggles he has documented lately, with anxiousness and different psychological well being points leaving him on the verge of quitting the game after 2019.
Signal as much as The Recap, our weekly electronic mail of editors’ picks.
“It has been very troublesome,” he mentioned. “It’s my job and it’s laborious to do your job while you’re frequently anxious about it.
“However I’ve moved ahead fairly a method, I’m looking for the right assist that I want. I believe that these wins, medals, right here and there, they do a small quantity for that.”
After successful bronze on the 3m springboard on the Olympics final yr, Laugher informed the world that he was again, and he has backed up these phrases. On the World Championships in June, Laugher departed with three medals, his biggest haul. Now he’s a Commonwealth Video games champion as soon as once more.
On an evening when Laugher continued his love affair with the Video games, the First Dates star Fred Sirieix watched on as his daughter Andrea Spendolini-Sirieix secured gold within the girls’s 10-metre platform diving last, her first senior worldwide gold medal within the occasion.
Sirieix shared a video clip of the 17-year-old competing to his Instagram the place he might be heard cheering her on as the gang applaud her dive.
He captioned the publish: “Gold! commonwealthgames2022 diving 10m platform”, including: “Nicely carried out mon duck” with a duck and coronary heart emoji.
Spendolini-Sirieix topped the leaderboard with an enormous 20.20 factors, together with her teammate Lois Toulson successful silver.
Final yr, throughout her Olympic debut in Tokyo, she was positioned seventh on the age of 16.
After the win in Birmingham, she mentioned: “I’m very, very completely happy. It’s superb for it to be on residence soil, a house video games, the primary time that I’ve really had a crowd as a result of I didn’t have one at Tokyo and on the different internationals I’ve carried out I haven’t actually had a giant crowd.
“It’s been unbelievable, I’ve had a lot enjoyable. I wasn’t actually scared, I used to be so peaceable, so I’m simply actually, actually pleased with the way it went.”
