You don't like to crush a youngster's dreams when they are just taking shape, but when my young daughter mentioned that she'd like to try diving, I felt I had to point out some home truths.
"Kid," I said, in that authoritative way I have. "Your mother doesn't like water and I'm terrified of heights. All things considered, I think your prospects of success here might be hampered by an unfortunate genetic inheritance. And no, I can't afford a pony either."
Still, lots of preteen wannabes have apparently been queuing up at diving clubs, starstruck after watching Splash! and smitten by the curiously androgynous figure that is Tom Daley. Diving might be the art of the graceful descent, but its popularity trajectory has lately taken it in the opposite direction.
Hence the buzz at Edinburgh's Royal Commonwealth Pool yesterday morning as the diving programme got underway. Now I don't want to fuel any inter-city spat here, but it would be fair to say that the capital has not gone Games crazy in quite the same way that Glasgow has over the past week. Strolling up Dalkeith Road, Edinburgh seemed to have a bad case of Games indifference instead.
Inside, however, things were very different. And not because of the action in (or, more accurately, just above) the pool, but because Daley had joined up with his England team-mates on the side. As he waved his flag of St George, the little hearts of the spectators fluttered along in unison.
Goodness only knows what they made of the rest of what was going on. In some ways, a practice session in the diving pool is actually more entertaining than the competition itself, for at least it offers more action as the competitors thwack-thwack-thwack into the water like a family of particularly hungry gannets gorging themselves on a shoal of mackerel.
I sat out the men's 1 metre springboard eliminator round on the basis that a 14-man event that whittles a field down to 12 is never going to be much of a nail biter. That said, as one of those who missed the cut was called Ramananda Kongbrailatpam, you could almost hear the sighs of relief of the venue announcer. And a few from the press benches as well.
Of far more interest was the women's synchronised 10m platform event. I don't remember much about physics, but one thing that stuck was that gravity acts equally on all things. Two objects falling from the same height will hit the earth, or in this case the water, at the same moment. This, clearly, is a good thing in the world of synchronised diving, where it would be a tad disappointing to bob back to the surface and see your partner floating down like a leaf in a breeze.
As it happens, the synchronisation actually involves three people, not just two. Ever wondered how television coverage includes a tracking shot of the divers actually entering the water? I had sort of hoped there might be a cameraman in a wetsuit setting off at exactly the same moment as the competitors, but the more mundane truth is that the camera is on a rail.
This is where the third fellow comes in. For at the very instant that the divers set off, the camera operator releases something that looks suspiciously like a sash weight, allowing the camera itself to drop like a stone.
Like a Liam Stone even. The New Zealand diver could not break into the medals in the 1m springboard competition, but he was the clear front-runner in the nominal determinism stakes. In which light, wouldn't it have been funny if Dominic Cork had taken up diving instead of cricket?
As for the technicalities, it has to be admitted that the fine details can be hard to digest while a diver tumbles downwards at 30mph. All you need to know is that making a big messy splash is a bad thing, a point I'll be stressing to my daughter next time I put her in the bath.
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