Everybody has a pretty bad day every once in a while. Sometimes, we have to leave home with bedhead or hit traffic or spill coffee down our shirts. Unfortunately for Olympics diver Ahmad Amsyar Azman, his really bad day happened to take place on one of the most important days of his life. The Malaysian athlete took to the diving board to flip and twist his way into a dive. The dive didn't exactly go as planned. Check it out!
That entry had to sting, and I don't just mean the pain of having botched his big moment. Ahmad Amysar Azman's land into the water looked like it hurt. A belly flop after the momentum of three meters of flips and twists couldn't have felt good. If you're anything like me, you immediately winced on his behalf...and then replayed the clip courtesy of the NBC Olympics Twitter account a few times.
Ahmad Amysar Azman's belly flop put him in last place in the Men's 3M Springboard Diving event. He came in at 29th with a score of only 341.70. It would have taken a score higher than 389.90 to advance Azman with seventeen other divers to the next round of the finals, so the poor guy was off by a lot. It was a sad turn for the young man who had been in 12th place prior to his flop. There was just no way he could have held his ranking when the highest score he got in any technique category was a 1.5. A great dive would have been 8.5 or 9 per category (a good dive, a little lower) and would have kept him in the competition; he didn't even come close.
It's not hard to see where his dive went wrong. Even those of us who only pay attention to diving every four years during the Olympics could probably guess right off the bat that Ahmad Amysar Azman was not going to land well. Instead of jumping straight off the front of the board, Azman veered to the side and jumped off the corner. His balance was clearly off before he even made his first flip, and there's just not enough time in a three-meter dive to compensate for a bad jump.
Ahmad Amysar Azman is luckily still young enough an athlete that the Rio 2016 Olympics might not be his only chance at an Olympic medal. The 23-year old diver could still have a long future of water athletics ahead of him. If some of his past diving performances are anything to go by, his Rio belly flop was a fluke. Check out one of the competitor's dives done right in a 2014 competition:
Maybe Ahmad Amysar Azman will have another shot at a medal for Malaysia when the 2020 Olympics go to Tokyo. The 2016 Olympics still have a few more days' worth of medals for other athletes to claim. The Games don't come to an end until August 21. NBC's ratings have been down for the Rio Olympics from the numbers from the 2012 London Olympics, and problems like injury and theft have caused trouble, but the events have been as entertaining this year as they've ever been.
Check out our fall TV premiere schedule to see what you'll be able to watch on the small screen once the Olympics come to an end.
