How to Score Olympic Diving

Olympic diving is a popular spectator sport in the summer Olympic games. While fun to watch, few understand the mechanics of how to score a dive. By breaking the dive up into sections, the scoring is easier to understand and makes watching diving more intriguing.

Instructions

1. Determine degree of difficulty. The degree of difficulty is based on the type of acrobatics combined in the dive.

2. Watch the approach and takeoff. The divers starting point is very important. The start of the dive is the building point, requiring height. The distance of the diver to the board should be no more than two feet.

3. Analyze the flight. All acrobatics are judged based on how they are executed. The diver's toes should always be pointed and the feet should always be touching.

4. Pay close attention to the entry. Judges award points based on how clean the entry into the water is. There should be no splash. The more waves that are created, the lower the score. Also, the diver should be completely vertical and there should be no angle when entry into the water occurs.

5. Add the point total together. Combine the scores for the takeoff, the flight and the entry to come up with the rough total.

6. Multiply total points by degree of difficulty. This results in the total score for an individual judge.

7. Determine final score. Usually, there are five judges. The highest and lowest marks are thrown out and the middle totals summed. This leads to more fair scoring and inability for a single judge to skew scores. In international meets, there are seven judges, the top and bottom scores are discarded and the remaining scores are multiplied by 3/5 to come up with the totals. This makes them comparable to five judge events.