Mexican divers are making history. By Day 7, they had already amassed more medals at these World Aquatics Championships than anyone except China – the most in Mexico’s history. And they’ve done it despite funding cuts, absence, and uncertainty.
On Thursday night, when Osmar Olvera Ibarra captured Mexico’s sixth diving medal at the World Aquatics Championships in Fukuoka, his silver padded what had already been a record-breaking medal cache for Mexico on 3m and 10m boards.
And the championships aren’t over.
By Saturday, Mexican divers could leave Fukuoka with as many as eight medals. If they do, they will have doubled the country’s previous best tally, in 2019.
But it hasn’t been a simple road.
Earlier this year, it wasn’t even clear if Mexico’s best divers would be here.
In January, the president of Mexico’s sports ministry cut funding from the Mexican swimming federation in the midst of a blowup with World Aquatics. A year earlier, World Aquatics, known as AQUA, had established a Stabilization Committee to take over the federation’s management in response to what it had called “repeated and blatant failures” of its leadership. Mexico challenged the legality of that, but the Court of Arbitration for Sport rejected the challenge in April of this year.
Nevertheless, they prevailed.
Jesus Mena, a 1988 Olympic diving medalist and the vice chair of the World Aquatics Diving Technical Committee, thinks there may be a combination of reasons.
“We have been absent from these big events because of the situation with team Mexico and the federation,” he said. “They have now this chance of participation. They really have such a desire to do well to show – first of all the level they’ve been training. All this time, they kept training, training, training. So to [finally] come to this big show – they really want to show all the hard work they have done in the shadow.”
Furthermore, diving is one of the most storied sports in Mexico. No other sport has brought it more Olympic medals (15).
“These divers know what their sport means for the country,” Mena said. He also credited AQUA for paying for most of the divers’ travel costs, but some were shut out.
“These divers know what their sport means for the country.”
Rio 2016 Olympian Jahir Ocampo Marroquin, for example, said his trip was not financed since he was not entered in any of the four men’s Olympic disciplines in Fukuoka and had not competed internationally since the Tokyo World Cup in May 2021.
As a result, Marroquin came to Japan without a coach and has been raffling off his 2014 grey Mercedes E250 at $100 US per ticket. On Thursday, he had sold 333 tickets and had yet to break even on the price of the car and his flight.
“I’m more famous for this than my competitions,” said Ocampo, who earned a silver medal in the team event earlier this week, and was a bronze medalist in the 2013 world championships in 3m synchro.
Several of Mexico’s four coaches on-site were also on their own, including Yaidel Gamboa, who coaches the 2023 double world medalist Aranza Vazquez Montano at the University of North Carolina. Gamboa said UNC offered him assistance.
Other divers, like the 2020 Olympic medalists Alejandra Orozco Loza and Gabriela Agundez Garcia were dreading the thought of auctioning off their medals until AeroMexico stepped in to offer free flights.
Another Olympian, 10m specialist Kevin Berlin Reyes, reportedly created a coffee brand.
“We are hungry for success,” Ocampo Marroquin reiterated. “We are hungry for competitions. We need to fight for them, and we fight with good results. We're training hard to be the best. We want to make history in diving with this awesome team.”
As Mexico’s oldest diver in Fukuoka, Ocampo Marroquin, 33, said of this squad, “It's the best team environment I’ve ever been in.”
But the fiesta is still to come.
“We focus on the last two competitions until the end, until the last event,” he explained. “Our flight is the next morning. We celebrate here after the last dive.”