Through a post on SCAQ Blog, I came across a DailyMail article titled: Tom Daley seeks to master the most difficult dive ever… and win gold at the London Olympics. Although I love when diving gets some media hype, the article boasts some incorrect facts that should be addressed for the sake of ensuring that online diving reports are accurate.

So in short, ‘The Twister’ isn’t the name of the dive, it isn’t the hardest dive ever done, and the degree of difficulty was incorrectly reported because it was changed as of September 15, 2009. If you want more of a breakdown, read on…

The article mainly talks about how British diving sensation, and current FINA World Champion in the Platform event, Tom Daley is preparing for the London 2012 Games. Tom has become something of a teen idol in England because of his success in diving – which is phenomenal – but all the more reason to be thorough when researching a report.

First, the author renames the back 2 1/2 somersault 2 1/2 twist in pike (5255B) ‘The Twister.’ Now, I’m not sure if Tom and his coach call it The Twister for short because it is the dive he was working on for a while, or if the author just didn’t want to write out “back 2 1/2 somersault 2 1/2 twist,” but The Twister is not the name of the dive.

Second, the article makes it sound like Tom Daley will be attempting the hardest dive ever done. While the 5255B was the dive used to score the highest single dive total in an Olympic competition (Matthew Mitcham, 2008, for 112.10 points) it is surely not the hardest dive ever performed. It was, however, the dive with the highest DD at the FINA World Championships, where 7 of the 12 finalists completed it successfully.

For the record, the forward 2 1/2 somersault 3 twist pike (with a higher DD of 3.9) has been performed in competition 3 times in the past 12 months, according to DiveMeets.com

Third, with the release of the updated FINA Degree of Difficulty table, the 5255B isn’t even the dive with the highest degree of difficulty. In fact, the dive’s degree of difficulty has been reduced from 3.8 to 3.6.