As usual travelling is always chaos when we rock up as the British
Diving team. The night before we stayed in London to catch an early 8am flight
to Toronto, when we got to Heathrow we were told to pick up bags in Toronto
before flying again to Windsor. With an hour and 25-minute turn around I said
to the check in desk "do we have enough time?" In which he replied
"Yeaaaahh you have plenty of time!!!" ... We ran out of time.
The plane was slightly delayed landing in Toronto, it took 20 minutes to
get off the plane, went through passport control, ran/hobbled through the
airport to the baggage collection point, some of the team's bags came 20
minutes later. We had missed the flight to Windsor and three staff along with
mine and Tonia's bags were a no show.
We then went through the process of lost baggage, sluggishly walked
through security to meet the other half of the team (with bags) and cheered
ourselves up with food. The plan was to train when we arrived, due to the
delayed flight landing at 4pm and getting to the hotel at 4.45pm I thought we
couldn't be training. 15 minutes later, we were out of the hotel and into a bus
to the pool, I am getting too old for terrible travel arrangements!!
After a day’s chaotic travel, evening training and slightly broken sleep
because of the five-hour time difference, we only had to be up the next morning
at 6am for training! Give me a break. Training was terrible but we improved for
the afternoon. It's a good job we only moan about poor preparation and don't let
it mess with our competition game. Different to the other World Series, our
synchro event was in the evening, we felt ready, somehow. We put in our best
ever performance, coming away with silver, and just under 2 points behind the
Chinese pair!!! It is the best feeling when we put all of our dives together,
we got this now, we know what we are doing leading into the World Championships
this summer.
I trained well before my individual competition on Sunday; I was ready
and up for fighting for a place in the final but it didn't happen how I wanted
it to. I tried my best and with everything leading up to individual; bad
travel, being on a high on Friday and trying to keep that high all weekend was
tiring.
It was great to see Jack win his third 3m title of the World Series,
being slightly off in London just showed that everyone has bad days but with a
strong head game, it put him right back up there where he belongs.
Windsor is a nice city to compete in, the people are very friendly and
every year we get to see baby geese crossing the road.
Across the river at the
diving pool is the USA city of Detroit; it is strange to see another country
whilst standing in a different one.
A couple of birthdays were celebrated while
were away, Tonia’s 26th and Tom’s 21st! The perfect
excuse to eat cake!
SB x