And then there was one. One more event. One more gold. And one giant historical milestone at stake. In the men’s 10m platform final on Saturday, the People’s Republic of China has a chance to sweep all eight Olympic diving gold medals at a single Games. It has never been done.
Saturday will mark a busy day for the men’s 10m divers. The morning features a semifinal, in which the athletes will have to finish among the top-12 to make the final and the right to vie for gold in the afternoon.
At age 29 and just a year after surgery to repair a recurring left shoulder dislocation, Cao Yuan will try to defend his gold from the Tokyo Games. The four-time Olympian has never gone home empty-handed from an Olympics, but this will be his only event in Paris. He will do the exact same dives, in the same order on Saturday as he did three years earlier Tokyo, where he scored 582.35 points to win. (Notably, in Tokyo, three of his six dives scored more than 100 points, and he earned seven perfect scores of 10 from the judges.) Cao is the only returning Olympic medalist in the field.
Cao’s teammate from China, Yang Hao, 26, however, is the current world champion on men’s 10m. Already, Yang has a gold medal from the very first men’s diving final in Paris: men’s10m synchro back on 29 July. Will he be refreshed? Or has the 12-day wait been too long for the first-time Olympian?
Also in the field, watch the 2023 world champion from Australia, Cassiel Rousseau, 23, who in Fukuoka, Japan, famously broke China’s six-year streak of winning every world championship event it had entered.
Rousseau may attract a slew of French fans, as his mother was born in Paris and his grandfather Michel Rousseau won Olympic gold for France in track cycling at the 1956 Melbourne Games.
Japan’s young phenom, Rikuto Tamai, 17, trained with Rousseau in Australia over the winter and is another diver with history-making potential. No Japanese athlete – male or female – has ever won an Olympic diving medal. Yet at 15, Tamai captured world championship silver on 10m, another first.
Meanwhile, Mexico will once again be pushing the degree of difficulty. Randal Willars Valdez, 22, has a show-stopping forward 4½ pike (with a 4.1 DD) which helped him place fourth in 10m at the 2024 World Aquatics Championships in February.
Also keep an eye on Ukraine’s 18-year-old Oleksii Sereda. He was a last-minute replacement for his teammate in this event, even though Sereda claimed world championship bronze on 10m in 2024 and placed sixth in both 10m events in Tokyo when he was 15.
The men’s 10m final will begin Saturday at 15:00 Paris time at the Aquatics Centre.