Wednesday, December 9, 2009

NEW F.I.N.A. Degree of Difficulty Table

With the newer and increasingly more difficult dives being performed in international competition as well as the rumors of "super difficult" dives being attempted in the farthest corners of the world, it was time that FINA updated the Degree of Difficulty Tables.

Numerous new and incredibly difficult dives have been added to the DD Chart that just 20 years ago were unthinkable. When you think back to the 1980's, it was thought that the dives being done then were the most difficult that could ever be performed. Now -- those "hard" dives are the norm for both men and women and for those divers dreaming of Olympic and International glory, the difficulty bar has been raised -- not by inches, but by feet!

Click here to see the new and approved FINA Degree of Difficulty Tables for both Springboard and Platform.

So, what is now the dive with the highest degree of difficulty? It is a 309B -- Reverse 4 1/2 somersaults in the pike position from the 3M Springboard with an eye-popping 4.8 Degree of Difficulty. If your athletic ability will not allow you to do this dive on 3M -- you do have the option of doing it from the 10 Meter platform -- but you LOSE a tenth of D.D. -- it is only a "paltry" 4.7!

I wonder what dives we will be seeing 20 years from now? Kind of exciting just thinking about it!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Looks interesting. I am wondering if anyone has a copy of the 1988 dd chart? Looking to make some comparisions for record purposes.

Thanks!

T. Brown

Steve Voellmecke said...

What dive(s) in particular are you interested in finding out what the DD was in 1988?

Unknown said...

I wrote a computer program in 1983 that contained the dd chart available then. It was used in high school meets.

It ran on TRSDOS 3. I probably still have the 160KB single sided floppy disk media, but don't have any way to read it.

If anyone is interested, throw an email and I'll try to dig it up. It was probably written in FORTRAN66, if that matters.