Jack Laugher blames 'too much adrenaline' for Olympic disappointment

The 26-year-old made history at Rio 2016 when he won 3m synchro gold, becoming the first-ever British Olympic diving champion.

But the former Harrogate Diving Club ace and his new partner – Dan Goodfellow – were never in contention this time around.

At the test event in Tokyo earlier this year they set a 440.94 personal best that would have been enough for bronze here.

But Tuesday’s showing could barely have gone any worse for the pair, who only avoided finishing last after the Russian Olympic Committee team’s final effort was ruled as a no dive.

“Springboard is a bit of b***h sometimes and it can go south very quickly. It was a tough day,” admitted Laugher.

“The errors were made were because we had too much adrenaline, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. It wasn’t a great competition in terms of scores, that shows how difficult it’s been for us all in the last 18 months.

“We’ve competed two other times this year, we had a brilliant event here and a real stinker at the European Championships, this is another one unfortunately

“We’ve worked really hard but people at home just see this, rather than the hard work we’ve put in. Usually I’d be quite sad but I know how hard we’ve worked. I apologise to everyone at home that we didn’t get the result we wanted.”

Laugher went on to reaffirm how hard the pair trained for the Olympics, insisting that anyone can have a “bad day”.

He added: “Our training has been really good, I feel it didn’t reflect what we’ve been training like.

"It’s really hard to explain how nerve wracking competing at the Olympic Games is and it’s a big ask for us to get medals at our first Olympics together.

“We’re really proud of what we’ve achieved, this is just a bad day and everyone has them.”

Meanwhile, Goodfellow stressed that he had no regrets about his switch from platform to springboard diving, despite watching former partner Tom Daley take gold alongside Matty Lee earlier this week.

"It was absolutely the right thing to do, I'm enjoying my springboard diving and coming into training every day without worrying about getting injured," he said.

"We've had some very good results so it's 100 percent the right decision.

"We were both a bit nervous but we also felt really good and we've been training well. We didn't have a good Europeans but we still felt very positive.

"In springboard diving the margin for error is so small and with dives this difficult you can easily make mistakes."

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