London 2012: Diving progress report

Podium athletes 11 Development athletes 16 UK Sport Mission 2012 progress rating Green Alexei Evangulov, performance director In the last year we have … recruited a new national performance director, who established a new four-year strategic plan for 2012. British Diving has undertaken some changes in its structure, has revised its relationships with the English Institute of Sport as well as made some changes to its relationships with the high performance centres. All these changes are quite positive. British Diving has recruited a Chinese coach to assist the Southampton high performance centre with preparation of the world class divers. British Diving has also recruited Julian Bellan as junior development manager, who has established his new strategy for the junior national team. In the field of performances British Diving has made quite big progress in performance. Tom Daley won 10m platform gold at last year's World Championships and despite his absence we enjoyed a successful World Cup last month. We achieved three top eight results in synchro events and two top 12 in individual events. British Diving has improved all the other positions. British Diving junior team had a fantastic performance at the junior European Championships this year in Helsinki where we won seven medals, four of them gold. This result was the best ever in the British Diving. All this is saying that British Diving is on the right track today. However, there are some challenges and, you could say, enemies on the British Diving's way to the Olympics. The main one is unpredicted and unexpected injuries, which sometimes break down our plans. In the next two years we will ... undertake all efforts to be prepared for the 2011 World Championships in Shanghai, which will define the trends, favourites and contenders for London. Medal tally projection … We have a real opportunity to win a medal. It is an extremely hard and almost inaccessible target, but this is our goal.