[Day 1] Diving: 10m Platform

The water is vast, a huge turquoise mouth eager to swallow me up. I have never seen so much of it, wide, deep, warm, waiting for a dive. Its surface is still and flat, electric with potential, like the audience sitting above it, poised with that same potential as they itch to applaud. It's in me as well, I can feel it in my taut diaphragm, my hot cheeks, my twitching, tingling extremities. I ache to climb the latter, and then I ache to fall; to shatter the perfect surface of the water, to release the baited breath of the spectators, to exhaust the tension in my muscles, breaking all those potentials at once.

I am more afraid of the landing than the tumble, which I know cannot be said for all my competitors. I have spend my whole teenagehood learning to fall not only with grace but with security, a skill I have had to use multiple times. It was the way I climbed and fell, turning through the air like a bird of prey swooping for a meal, that first got the attention of one of the most prestigious Career families in the District. Or at least, at the time. I don't associate myself with the Morenos by choice anymore, but seeing as their surname is mine by law, it was those parents, not my theatrical family, who received the invitation to come and watch me perform those same feats here. It strikes me as incredible that, even though these Games are not the ones we consider our national pride, us competitors are still seen as mere objects, unable to make our own choices - even in the friends we wish to accompany us from home.

As my name rings over the tannoy, I begin my path to the ladder. The audience goes wild, a combination of cheers for the sport, hisses for the surname, and confused applause for the odd, small girl with the tousled blue hair who even the Career trainers from One have never heard of. A surprise, I hope, considering how nimbly I scale the ladder. If only they could score me for that. My head doesn't swim at the top, in fact vertigo barely stirs at all. Instead of the water below, the diving board above, I envisage a metal rigging, hung heavy with stage lights like a tree in Autumn, and below me nothing more than sheets of billowing chiffon - a stage ocean. All I have to remember is that, however I tumble, I'm going to land on my hands.

Katrina was nervous, though she never would have admitted it. She was built for speed and endurance, not fancy tricks. But with having missed sign-ups for the decathlon, she had had to pick several other events to compete in. Diving wasn't difficult, but competitively, she didn't feel like it was one of her strong points. She ascended the ladder and chided herself for psyching herself out.  She was from dsitrict four, wasn't she? She lived and breathed the water. She was a career,wasn't she? She lived and breathed for competition. Heaven help anyone that was in her way. There was a Moreno and a Hammerfell, both names from other districts she knew well. If she had gotten a chance to, she would have said something about them needing to get ready to lose, just like their families did in the games.  

Maybe it was cruel, but in competition, you needed every edge you could get. So who gave a flying fuck about a rival's feelings? Katrina gave the crowd her biggest smile, and after an experimental jump, she was off, heading down to the water, making a mental note to ensure that if the first dive was good, then the other two needed to be great. 

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because rade is dumb

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Sabrina Elle
Diving 10m Platform

I hadn't done as well as I had hoped when it came to swimming earlier on in the day, so I was banking on doing better in diving to get my satisfaction from the Olympics. I was in my swimsuit and ready to go. Although, I was a bit nervous this time, as I knew that there was always the chance that I would mess up terribly. When I talked to one of my friends before the Olympics started, she told me I would do fantastically, and so far, that hadn't been true.

When my name rang through the area, I took my place. No one really knew the name, so there weren't as many cheers as some other people had gotten, however, I knew that my family and friends were part of the few cheers that had existed. I had my hair tied back in a pony tail, and I was in my place, ready to dive.

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