The Chinese duet took an easy lead in the preliminaries with 477.96 (30.75 ahead of David Boudia/Nick McCrory, USA).

Since the last FINA World Championships, men’s diving became more complicated. The degree of difficulty (DD) of 4.5 Forward (109C) was increased to 3.7 and many divers immediately included this combination into the free programme.

Sometimes the search for extreme difficulty is not fruitful. The example came from the side of the Mexican team: German Sanchez and Ivan Garcia had the highest accumulated DD but finished 7th.

Six duos out of the 12 finalists tried to perform the 109C and in five cases the risk paid off: the score for this dive was over 80 points (Russia’s Ilya Zakharov/Victor Minibaev were the best, with 93.24). At the same time, 109C became a big disappointment for Peter Waterfield/Thomas Daley (GBR). They got only 71.04 for this dive.

The Russian team had really great chances to finish in the “Olympic zone” – the first three teams here in Shanghai are qualified for the 2012 Games in London (GBR). After the fourth round they moved to the second position, just 15 points behind China. But the last two rounds are normally the psychological test for the divers. Last year, Zakharov and Minibaev didn’t pass it: they were leading at the European Championships in Budapest until the very last dive, but finally came second.

The situation was almost the same in Shanghai. The fifth round brought bad luck to the Russian team. Both divers made a mistake in the 3.5 Reverse Tuck and dropped themselves to the fourth position. In the same round, US team David Boudia/Nick McCrory also missed a 3.5 Back pike and went to the fifth position.

The last dive didn’t change the leaders’ order: Germany got silver, Ukraine finished third.

The distance between gold and silver was over 37 points and China was the only team who got eight perfect marks (10) during this final.