A historic night for Team GB as Jack Laugher and Chris Mears won the first ever diving gold medal to become Men’s 3m Synchro Olympic Champions.
The pair laid down a marker as they scored comfortably over 100 points from their required dives in the opening two rounds of the final at the Maria Lenk Aquatics Centre in Rio.
The Team GB pair, who won World Championship bronze last year, then took the lead in the third round and held on for the rest of the final, ultimately finishing 4.11 points clear on 454.32.
Their highest scoring dive came in the final round of the final and confirmed them
Laugher and Mears ended Chinese domination of the 3m Synchro event that has lasted since the Athens games of 2004.
As well as Team GB’s first Olympic diving gold, Laugher and Mears won the first British medal in the 3m synchro event, introduced to the Olympic schedule at Athens 2000.
Added to Tom Daley and Dan Goodfellow’s 10m synchro bronze from two days ago, the Team GB divers have now matched their best medal haul at an Olympics, having also won two medals at the Rome Games in 1960.
Jack Laugher said: “We enjoy diving in the rain. We love it. Last time in Brazil when we were here we got a couple of days where it rained and we really enjoyed it.
“So we took on the English weather with the wind and the rain and the cloudiness but we embraced it. We embraced all the different things that were put in front of us and we’ve come out with the medal so we’re really happy.
“We did fantastic in London [at the European Championships] on our fifth round dive, the triple out, which is the hardest dive in the world on 3m. We did it well today although it can be better. But I’ve got a gold medal so I don’t care. I’m not going to go up and do it again.
“It’s fantastic to win Britain’s first Olympic gold in diving. We only found out that it was the first gold medal before the podium.
“It’s one of the first on springboard as well so we’re so overwhelmed with what we’ve done, what we’ve done this year, especially with all the setbacks and with the massive risk of putting in that hard dive into our list.
“The dreams happened and it’s paid off and we’re ecstatic with how we’ve done.”
Chris Mears said: “We’ve been looking pretty damn good in training. As you can see the conditions are a big thing here. One minute you can be diving in sunshine, then it’s cloudy, then it’s raining and it’s really windy. So there are a lot of factors that can throw people off.
“We didn’t let that phase us today out there, we did our thing and we came out on top. The Americans definitely put the pressure on us and they were quite vocal about it and quite emotional.
“But we just stayed in our zone. We didn’t know how many points we needed because we weren’t concentrating on that. All I concentrated on was landing on my head on my dive and I did that. And so did Jack so we came out on top.”