Scarlett Mew Jensen and Yasmin Harper claimed Team GB’s first medal at Paris 2024 with bronze in the women’s synchronised diving.
It is the first medal for the British team at the opening Olympics since 2004, when the pair finished third in the 3m springboard event.
Mew Jensen and Harper looked to have missed out on the podium after their final attempt left them third, with Australia well positioned to take bronze with one dive remaining and a small lead to overcome.
However, a mistake by Australians Annabelle Smith and Maddison Keeney allowed the British team to secure a surprise bronze medal.
Smith nearly missed the springboard and landed on one foot, resulting in a jump completely out of sync with his partner Keeney.
The pair were visibly distraught after missing out on the podium in such disastrous circumstances, dropping to fifth place.
Olympic diving silver medallist Leon Taylor told the BBC: “I can’t begin to describe what Annabelle Smith must be feeling.
“He is at the end of his career, he is 31 years old. These could be his last Olympic Games, they probably will be.
“It’s very difficult, but that’s the way it is. What a dramatic opening event!”
Commonwealth silver medallist Tonia Couch added: “Every jump counts and Australia could have taken a medal.
“They needed 50 points, that’s nothing and they fell off the board. Annabelle (Smith) doesn’t normally do that.
“Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn’t, but usually it happens during training. I didn’t expect it.”
“They probably thought they didn’t need to do much to get a medal. A lot of things could have been going through their minds and unfortunately for them, they were wrong.
“Our girls (Scarlett Mew Jensen and Yasmin Harper) did amazing, they scored over 300 points and they should be very proud.”
It also gave Britain its first Olympic medal in women’s diving in 64 years, since Liz Ferris in 1960.
Yani Chang and Yiwen Chen easily won gold, finishing first in all five rounds, while the American duo of Sarah Bacon and Kassidy Cook took silver.
Harper said afterwards: “We’re very excited, very pleased with ourselves. We came into this event knowing that this is what we wanted and we had to stand up on the boards and deliver, and I’m very proud that we were able to do that this morning.”
“Every time we do a dive we talk a little bit to each other to take our time because we know what we’re doing, but on our last dive we decided to change our order and put our hardest dive at the end just to have a little bit of an extra advantage at the end and we put our best dive in there so it went well for us and we were very satisfied.”
He added: “We knew they (Australia) had to back off a bit to feel the pressure on that jump and that meant we came away with a bronze medal, so we couldn’t be happier.”
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