Jack Laugher admitted that he “let the emotions get the better of me” after missing out on another Olympic medal in the men’s three-metre springboard diving final.
Laugher, who had won bronze alongside Anthony Harding in the synchro event last week, was looking to claim his fifth Olympic medal, which would have seen him draw level with Tom Daley as the most successful British diver of all-time.
Those hopes were dashed, though, when a poor third dive scored just 35.70, Laugher's total of 410.95 some way short of the 467.05 he had posted in Wednesday’s semi-final to qualify for the final ranked third.
It was good enough only for seventh as Chinese pair Xie Siyi and Wang Zongyuan took gold and silver, respectively, to continue their country’s dominance of the board at these Games, while Mexico’s Osmar Olvera grabbed his second medal of the meet with a phenomenal 500.40 for bronze. Fellow Briton Jordan Houlden finished a fine fifth at his debut Olympics.
“I’m sad, obviously,” Laugher, the Rio 2016 synchro gold medalist, said. "I knew coming into this what I could do. In the preliminary rounds and the semi-final, I was taking it as it comes and focusing on myself.
"I think here, I let the emotion get the better of me. I think I wanted the end result too much. I thought about that too much over the process.”
The Chinese duo were always likely to have gold and silver between them, leaving Laugher as favourite for bronze alongside Olvera, one half of the Mexican pair that had come so close to a major upset when winning silver in the synchro event.
Olvera started best of the pair, but his slight miss on a third dive of 63.00 seemed to have opened the door for the Brit to seize the initiative.
Instead, though, Laugher over-rotated on his inward three-and-a-half somersaults - on paper one of his two easiest dives - and hit the water hard.
"It was the nail in the coffin moment at that point, really,” he said. “I wished at that point I could have pulled out but I’m really happy I continued on.
“I am a fantastic athlete and I’ll always see things through, it just wasn’t the fairytale that I wanted it to be.”
The blunder left the 29-year-old almost 40 points adrift of the medals at the halfway stage. From there, he needed snookers, but any slim chance of bridging the gap disappeared when Olvera nailed his penultimate dive, a score of 98.80 the highest of any competitor all day and all but securing a medal.
Laugher is now 29 and while he has no plans to retire, he admits he does not know whether he will make it to a fifth Games in Los Angeles in four years’ time.
"I have no idea what the future’s going to hold,” he added. “But Osmar, who came third, two years ago I’d never seen him, never heard of him, really.
“Now he’s come out and he’s top three in the world. Diving changes very quickly, we might have something like that happen in Britain. Who knows who is going to bump me out of my place?”
