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Great Britain claimed gold in the men’s synchronised 3m springboard after finishing on a score of 453.32, four points ahead of USA’s Sam Dorman and Mike Hixon and a further eleven points adrift was China’s pair of Yuan Cao and Kai Qin.
The team GB pair performed impressively throughout and didn’t put a foot wrong in any of their six dives leading the standings from the end of round three and staying their until the end to finish with the gold medal.
The City of Leeds pair join fellow Team GB divers Tom Daley and Daniel Goodfellow, who won bronze in the men’s 10m synchronised diving, as medallists.
This gold medal adds to the Team GB divers other gold medals they won at the European Championships in London earlier this year and at the Commonwealth Games in 2014. While they also won a bronze medal at last year’s World Championships in the same event.
This medal marks an incredible journey for Chris Mears, who seven years ago was in a coma with a 5% chance of survival after he had suffered a burst spleen during fiving training for the Youth Olympics in Sydney.
Mears was told he would never dive again and doctors thought he would have brain damage or physical disability as a result of his internal injury, but he battled through to ultimately fulfil his dream of competing at the Olympic Games.
During the competition the Great Britain pair of Laugher and Mears were the only team to perform the forward 2 ½ somersaults with three twists, which carried the highest degree of difficulty at 3.9 of any dive in the competition.
