Of the four disciplines in the sport of aquatics, diving is the smallest of the disciplines although probably the most spectacular when performed at the highest level.
Wales in the past has produced some of the best divers in Great Britain both women and men that have competed up to and including the Olympic Games. This level of diving has been severely curtailed by the loss of the only facility with a complete set of diving boards in Wales (Empire Pool). This has not helped but has not stopped diving from continuing with the facilities we have. The centres for diving in north and south Wales are Bangor Diving Club, based at the pool in Bangor, although a new club the members are enthusiastic and willing to develop where possible. Cardiff and Aberdare Diving Club, based in the Sobel Centre in Aberdare, covers the south. This club has been in existence for over thirty years and has produced divers to all levels, from novice to Olympic level. At present it only accepts children from 7years to 16 years for lessons but hopes in the near future to expand to Masters 18-80 years.
For further information contact the Swim Wales office, Tel:               01792 513636       

Background to the sport of Diving

The earliest depiction of diving is of a young boy diving on a Greek vase, dated some 2500 years ago, little is known of any type of diving after this until the late 19th century when the sport of diving was known a plunging. This was limited to dives normally in the straight position, this did not change until the early 1920’s when divers began to add somersaults to dives which progressed to dives not only forward and backward but inward and reverse, to this was added twists dives.
Most diving at this time was still being done in rivers, lakes and local duck ponds.
With the spread of local municipal swimming pools, diving boards were added and the sport at last had the facilities to become a recognised sport in the Olympic Games.
The modern day sport of diving consists of groups of dives as following:

All these dives can be performed in one of either four positions:

The combination of groups and positions create hundreds of dives if you include the various different heights of boards used in modern day diving. These can still be added to by the invention of more movements as long as these can be shown to safe and achievable. Each dive is given a number to identify it, 101 forward dive straight,201 back dive straight and so on to include somersaults and twists. In competitions the divers are judged by either a panel of five or seven judges each will award points from 0 to 10 depending on their option of how well the dive was performed. When all the scores have been taken down by the recorders, the highest and lowest scores are removed to allow for any bias there may have been in the judging. The result is then multiplied by the tariff for the dive to give a final score for the dive, the harder the dive the higher the tariff.
In this country diving takes a progressive route from novices to world performance.
The normal progression for a child to a top athlete would be, Novice, Intermediate, Age Group, Senior Championships to trails for Internationals, this will obviously vary in time by the ability of the diver but it should always be remembered diving is fun and can be enjoyed by everyone whether they want to be an Olympic diver or just have fun diving at the local pool.