Daily Times

GLASGOW: Ukrainian Sofiia Lyskun demonstrated notable composure at 16 to pull off a winning final dive under pressure, enabling the teenager and partner Oleg Kolodiy to celebrate victory in the mixed team final at the European Championships on Monday.

The action at the inaugural multi-event Championships moved from Glasgow to the Royal Commonwealth Pool in Edinburgh where the first of 13 diving finals was being staged and Lyskun provided a memorable opening. The youngster demonstrated her appetite for big meet competition when, aged 15, winning bronze at the 10 metres platform synchro event at last year’s European Championships in Kiev. Yet this was pressure of a different order when she was forced to produce a fine final dive to allow her and 25-year-old maths graduate Kolodiy to snatch the gold medal from Germany’s Lou Massenberg and Maria Kurjo.

The youngster’s difficult dive – a back two-and-a-half somersaults and one-and-a-half twists in pike – from the 10 metre board was so well executed that she earned the highest final round mark of any diver. It gave the Ukrainian pair a winning total of 355.90 to the German duo’s 352.60, while the Russian team of Evgenii Kuznetsov and Iuliia Timoshinina were left to curse two poor final dives that turned a likely gold into bronze.

Published in Daily Times, August 7^th 2018.