At 16, Andrea Spendolini-Sirieix had been the youngest member of the British diving team at the Tokyo Games and said afterwards that she found so little joy in her first Olympic experience that she wasn’t sure she fancied another.
How glad the young Londonder must be this morning that she got back on the board.
Paired with Lois Toulson, and with TV-famous father Fred Sirieix watching on at the side of the pool, the 19-year-old dove to women’s 10-metre synchro bronze, Britain’s first ever Olympic medal in the event.
“I’m so happy I didn’t give up,” she said, before heaping praise on her partner, for whom this was a first Olympic medal at her third Games. “I feel like I’ve grown as a person, not just an athlete, alongside Lois and she’s taught me a lot.
“The medal can’t describe how much I love Lois and love diving alongside her.”
Going into the final round, they had been fourth, but delivered their best dive of the day when it mattered most to climb a place, before a nervy wait for Canada’s riposte ended with the Brits still ahead.
At times in the past, Spendolini-Sirieix has been irritated at being spoken of constantly in relation to her father, but says she is at ease with it now.
As well as battling a bout of the ‘twisties’ in Tokyo - the same terrifying, mid-air mental block that hindered Simone Biles at the same Games - Spendolini-Sirieix struggled with loneliness as the pandemic kept her family away.
Having both the her proudly French father and her Italian mother here has been a source of calm, even if Fred, on soft duty for the BBC in the press box, was understandably anything but.
She joked afterwards of having “completed the home Games”, winning medals at the Commonwealths in England, Europeans in Rome and now Paris’s Olympics. Her choice of celebration, though, was distinctly French: “I’m having a croissant,” she said. “That’s all I want.”
There probably ought to be some way of marking up medals won behind China off the diving board. This triumph ahead of North Korea kept the sport’s dominant force on track to sweep every gold medal at these Games, with the only one they missed out on in Tokyo, to Tom Daley and Matty Lee, already secure.
There again, such has been China's margin of victory in every final so far in Paris that the rest are fortunate that daylight is yet to be given silver. Hongchan Quan and Chen Yuxi were just 14 and 15 when winning this title three years ago and here, were away and gone from the opening dive, almost 30 points clear by the third. So great was their cushion, they might have belly-flopped the fifth and still won. The only time either looked in any way flappable was in their winners’ press conference, when congratulated by Chinese snowboard superstar Eileen Gu.
Britain, though, had a perfect record of their own to maintain, silver for Daley and Noah Williams and bronze for Scarlett Mew Jensen and Yasmin Harper meaning they, too, had had podium presence in every event.
A missed third dive left Toulson and Spendolini-Sirieix with work to do to stick with the trend. Too much, for a while, it seemed. Under extreme pressure, though, they came up clutch, a score of 77.76 taking their final total to 304.38, too good for Canada, who eventually finished fourth on 299.22 and left the pool in tears.
“I knew going into this competition it was probably the best opportunity I have of getting an Olympic medal, alongside Andrea,” said Toulson. “I can’t wait to put the medal around [my parents’] necks and enjoy it with them.”
Spendolini-Sirieix was hardly alone in leaving Tokyo disillusioned by an Olympic experience so far removed from that of which every athlete dreams. Still, to hear her talk of hating the sport, possibly of quitting, while still so full of promise and so early in her career, was a shock.
Something, though, just would not let her walk away and Los Angeles in 2028 will surely stay on her radar, even if she plans to stop being a full-time athlete to study journalism at university once this summer is done.
“You guys get to go to competitions and watch different sports, learn about people,” she told the British hacks assembled in the mixed zone. “You share peoples’ stories and I really do think that’s a beautiful thing.”
So, a bronze medal for diving, and gold for flattery, too.
