Tom Daley has said that the disappointment that he and Dan Goodfellow suffered at the European Championships acted as motivation as they secured bronze in the synchronised 10m platform.
Earlier this year, the Great Britain pairing were edged into silver by Germany, but Daley and Goodfellow gained revenge on Monday night in Rio de Janeiro as they achieved third place at the Olympic Games.
After executing their final dive, Daley and Goodfellow were made to wait anxiously before their score was confirmed but Daley has insisted that he and his teammate were always confident of winning a medal in Brazil.
The 22-year-old told reporters: "It was an agonising wait that felt like it was an eternity. We were stood there and knew we had done a good dive but were didn't know if we'd done enough.
"It was just one of those moments where I knew how I would feel if it came up on the scoreboard that we finished fourth and I knew how I would feel if we finished third. We were just waiting and waiting with replay after replay, then all of a sudden the scores came up, I pounced on Dan and I don't think he was quite ready for it and then before we knew it we were back in for a top bombing seventh dive.
"We knew we had a shot at winning a medal. We've only been diving together since October so we're a new partnership and we didn't actually expect to qualify for the Olympics.
"But since then we've won medals in every world event, World Series, European Championships. Back in the European Championships it was a similar situation going into the last round dive and the Germans pipped us by two points. We didn't want to let that happen again. I said to Dan afterwards, don't worry we'll get them at the Olympics. And we did."
China and the United States won gold and silver respectively.
Darren Plant
