DIVING: Olympic gold medallist and Australian Youth Olympic Festival Ambassador Matthew Mitcham is confident Australia’s eight divers will do well when competition gets underway on Friday.

"They’re certainly not new. They have been around the elite level of Australia for some time already," Mitcham said.

The Australian team (Matthew Barnard, Emily Boyd, Luke Clohessy, Maddison Keeney, Joshua Ong, Scotia Mullin, Lara Tarvit and Nancy Wang) spent Wednesday morning training at the Aquatic Centre.

Mitcham suggests 16-year-old Keeney, from Western Australia, will be the one to watch in the individual and synchronised 3m springboard.

"She’s powerful beyond her years," he said.

As a former AYOF athlete himself, Mitcham believes the Youth Olympics is a good stepping stone to bigger multi-sport events like the Olympic Games and Commonwealth Games.

"This competition is really wonderful. Athletes rarely get opportunities like this. It’s such a wonderful experience, not just as in socialising for the kids, but the value that they can get out of it, you can’t get it anywhere else," he said. "One in four of the athletes who went to London 2012, went to Youth Olympic Festivals. So that’s a pretty good statistic."

In his role as AYOF Ambassador, Mitcham has been spending time with the younger divers in between both his and their training sessions.

"I try and live by example. Rocking up to training, positive, even if I’m tired I’ll give it my all. Setting an example that way, rather than telling someone what is right."

After finishing 13th in the 10m platform at the London Olympics, Mitcham decided to change disciplines to springboard, because platform, he said, was “breaking” him.

"I’ll have a few competitions later this year to get a feeling for how to compete on the springboard again because it’s very, very different," he said.

Emily Groves
Olympics.com.au