RIO DE JANEIRO –  Wherever Rut Paez’s diving career takes her, she will always have Rio.

The record books will show that the 15-year-old Mexican swept the 1m and 3m springboard events for girls 14-15 years old when she added the 3m gold on Day 7. Earlier, she claimed another victory in the synchro platform event. Triple gold!

Simone Conte of Italy had a sweep of his own, on platform. On Saturday, the 17-year-old won the boys’ platform event in the 16- to 18-year-old category. He also won the synchro platform gold three days earlier.

Find out who shared the podium with Paez and Conte on Saturday and what they had to say, below.

Girls B – 3m Springboard

In the last springboard event for 14- to 15-year-old girls in Rio, scores from the first five dives in prelims were added to the scores from all three dives in the final.

Once the final was underway, the top-3 athletes kept their positions through all three rounds. In the end, Mexico went 1-2, led by Rut Paez who won her third gold medal in Rio with 380.20 points. Her training mate for the past four or five months, Zyanya Parra Martin, was just 5.20 behind her to claim silver. Nina Berger of Germany, 15, placed third with 359.35 points.  

Paez, the winner, said, “I’m so happy with the three gold medals. Most important is to put up the hands and thank God for that.”

She said that she and Parra Martin didn’t talk to each other during the event. “We stayed concentrated and focused. We just said, ‘Good luck’ before the competition and, ‘Congratulations’ after the competition.”

Next, Paez said, “My goal is to improve my dives and be better, better, and better,” adding that the next dive she wants to work on is 305C (a reverse 2½) or 305B.

Runner-up Parra Martin performed the hardest dive in the contest, a forward 3½ which had a 3.1 degree of difficulty. It wasn’t her highest-scoring dive, but she was happy with the silver medal – especially since the three boys and two girls from her Encinada training group all have Rio medals now. The others include Jesus Agundez (gold in boys’ 3m synchro), Mateo Zacai Nolasco Zenteno (silver in boys’ B platform), Alejandro Flores (silver in boys’ platform synchro), Rut Paez (three gold), and herself.

But Parra Martin doesn’t plan to celebrate much in Brazil, she said, “because my family’s not here. I will wait to get back to Mexico and celebrate with them. I have one older sister who is a fencer. And I have another ‘sister’ – our little dog, Miwa. She’s a husky, 7 years old.”

Meanwhile, Berger, the bronze medalist, was one of two divers from her training group in Aachen, Germany, who made the trip to Rio. (The other was Tim Axer.) Saturday’s bronze was her first junior world championship medal, but it wasn’t her first outdoor competition. She also placed fourth in 3m at the 2023 Junior European Championships in Croatia.

“Sometimes when it’s hot or in the rain, it can be hard to find orientation and open up at the right time before you hit the water,” Berger explained. “It wasn’t that bad today, though.”

Boys A - Platform

Boys A platform format added the first four dive scores from prelims to five dives in the final. The diver with the highest nine-dive total was the winner.

In the end, it was Conte. He was in third place entering the final, and took the lead in the second round with his hardest dive, an armstand back double with a 3.6 degree of difficulty. It scored 82.80 (a single-dive score that was topped only by Sam Vajerhelabad of Iran’s 85.00 points for a reverse 3½ in round three).

Conte attributed the victory to “many, many hours of work in training, and being focused in competition.” He admitted that he was a bit nervous before his final dive, an inward 3½, with 3.2 degree of difficulty – not because it was new, just because it was the last dive. He told himself beforehand, “Just keep the takeoff straight and jump.

Eighteen-year-old Danylo Avenesov of the Ukraine took silver with 531.70 points (15.95 behind Conte) by consistently racking up 70 or more points on all five of his final dives.

The bronze medal, however, all came down to the last diver. 

Vajerhelabad was already waiting in the third-place spot, but the highly-experienced American Joshua Hedberg had by far the hardest dive list and was earning big scores. In round two, Hedberg earned 81.00 points for his 3.6 DD armstand back double, then botched his reverse 3½ in round three (scoring 56.10), and rebounded with a 3.7 DD forward 4½.

All Hedberg had left was his 3.6 DD back 2½ with a twist.  

He landed cleanly, and when the judges entered their scores, every one of them posted 7.5. The 81.00 points gave Hedberg a total of 528.70, just enough for the American to take bronze and bump Vajerhelabad off the podium by 4.95 points.

Hedberg always knew the afternoon would be a battle because he started the final in 11th place (of the 12 finalists) based on his preliminary scores.

“I didn’t do the best set of required dives in the prelims,” he said, “so I had to step it up in the final to get a medal. There’s obviously some pressure [before the last dive]. I just reminded myself to stay confident and perform it like I do it every day in training in Indianapolis.”

NEXT: The 2024 World Aquatics Junior Diving Championships concludes Sunday with two finals for the youngest group of divers (ages 14-15): girls’ platform and boys’ 1m springboard.