As Day 7 of the Paris Olympics was winding down on Friday, Mexico earned its second silver silvers of the Games thanks to a dazzling performance by divers Osmar Olvera Ibarra and Juan Manuel Celaya Hernández.
Challenging heavily favored China for the gold in the synchronized 3-meter springboard event, Olvera and Celaya’s powerful and elegant moves had them atop the leaderboard at times, before the duo finished in second place.
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With nine days left before the closing ceremony, Mexico now has two silvers and one bronze medal, just one medal short of the country’s total haul from the 2020 Summer Games, held in 2021 in Tokyo (no gold, no silver, four bronze).
Olvera, a 22-year-old native of Mexico City, and Celaya, a 25-year-old who was born in the Monterrey metropolitan area, accumulated a score of 444.03. The Chinese pair Long Daoyi and Wang Zongyuan, back-to-back world champions, took the gold with 446.10 points, while Great Britain’s team secured the bronze with 438.15 points.The Mexican duo are coached by Ma Jin, who left her native China 21 years ago to become coach of the Mexican national diving team as part of a decades-old Chinese program that pairs coaches with sports teams of other countries.
Jin had a plethora of obstacles to overcome, such as learning a new language and leaving behind her 11-year-old son, whom she didn’t see again until he was 17.
In five Olympics with Mexico, her divers have won four silver medals and three bronze, making the diving team one of Mexico’s most successful Olympic squads along with archery and weightlifting.
Olvera and Celaya made history by becoming the first Mexicans to win a medal in the synchronized 3-meter springboard competition.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador took time during a Friday meeting with his security cabinet to congratulate the duo, noting that “they gave satisfaction to all Mexicans.”
He stressed that the competition was “very close” and that the judges “had to make a very difficult decision, because the Mexican duo performed very well, as did the Chinese [duo].”
“So we congratulate them, and keep going [Mexico], because more medals are coming,” the president added.
The Defense Ministry (Sedena) also congratulated the duo, as Corporal Olvera and Private Celaya are among a group of high-performance Mexican military athletes participating in these Olympics.
In the third and fourth rounds of the competition, Olvera and Celaya received standing ovations from the crowd for a pair of dives with high degrees of difficulty. Their final dive had a 3.9 degree of difficulty, making it the most complex dive of the competition.
Their silver medal marked the 16th time in Olympic history that Mexico medaled in the sport of diving. Overall, it was Mexico’s 76th medal in the history of the Summer Olympics.
With reports from El País, El Economista and La Jornada
