BEIJING – We can thank Butch and Sundance for this, if you think about it. They were the groundbreakers. You remember: they were trapped on a cliff, Lefors? men were closing in, and they wound up having this memorable exchange:
Butch: “Well, the way I figure it, we can either fight or give. If we give, we go to jail.”
Sundance: “I been there already.”
Butch: “If we fight, they stay right where they are and starve us out, go for position, shoot us, they might even get a rockslide started and get us that way. What else can they do?”
Sundance: “They could surrender to us, but I wouldn?t count on that.”
That?s when it hits wise old Butch. They?ll jump into the canyon below, and swim their way out! Sundance protests on account of the small detail that he can?t swim, but soon they?re grabbing either end of a gun holster and off they go, together, splashing into the river.
America?s first synchronized diving team.
Thomas Finchum and David Boudia are America?s latest synchronized diving team. They are both 19 years old, both hail from the Indianapolis area, and have been the class of this country?s 10-meter platform diving competitors for a couple of years now.
Sometimes, they compete against each other, as elite athletes who are also friends often do. Sometimes, they compete together, as they did yesterday at the National Aquatics Center, which was still vibrating from the aftershock of the American victory in the men?s 4×100 freestyle relay not long before.
Now, it was shaking anew, because diving is China?s baseball, its national obsession, the monitor of its athletic heartbeat. Lin Yue and Huo Liang had piled up an early lead based on the strength of a pile of early perfect 10s, and they were cruising in for the gold, and that filled the Water Cube with a raucous wave of glee.
Below them were four teams fighting for two medals: Germany, Russia, Australia, and the Finchum-Boudia tandem, the two of them already angry at themselves for being where they were.
“We?re used to being so much more consistent than that,” Finchum said.
“We just couldn?t click,” Boudia said.
This is a sport that is either overwhelmingly silly or downright terrifying, depending on how you look at it. The fright comes in the height: 10 meters is roughly 33 feet above the ground, and that?s bad enough if Lefors is on your tail. But when you have to tuck and somersault and flip, and do it while mirroring your partner?s moves .ñ.ñ.
Well, that?s the silly part, let?s be honest.
Silly until you realize they hit the water at around 35 miles an hour. Silly until you see what missing a dive by a couple of inches can do to the human body. Silly until you actually take a jump from 33 feet above pool level (not that any sane person would).
(OK, here are the things that are silly about this event: the incessant need for TV cameras to follow each team into their between-dives visits to showers and hot tubs. The fact that they take their towels into the showers with them, rendering them completely irrelevant.)
Silly until you see the Chinese team, Yue and Liang, each disappear into a pocket of pool and leaving a splash the side of a nickel, and you see the Germans and the Russians executing these ridiculous spinning, twisting impossibilities in the air, and you see the Aussies executing one fascinating dive in which it seemed they borrowed a few moves from Ang Lee before splashing down.
Then if you are the young Hoosiers from the U.S., you take your fifth-place finish and you move on to the individual-diving competition next week, and you?re left to ask yourself, as Finchum did, “Someday, I guess, I?ll wonder what went wrong.”
Maybe they should have held on to that gun holster after all. It worked for the originals.