After Friday's exhilarating Opening Ceremony, excitement is high for more than 300 athletes on Team Great Britain. By the end of Saturday's events, three of those athletes had found their places on the medal podiums and it has set the stage for many exciting moments of the Games to come
Harper and Mew Jensen plunge to victory
Great Britain's first medal of Paris 2024 was an emotional victory at the women's 3 meter synchronized springboard diving competition. In earlier dives, Harper and Mew Jensen's scores left them short of points needed for a medal.
In the final round, Australian divers Maddison Keeney and Anabelle Smith were in third place and within .84 points of the silver medal spot. Then Smith slipped during their dive and this affected the rest of the pair's dive. Their Round 4 score of 74.40 was followed by a 48.60 in Round 5.
Harper and Mew Jensen scored a 70.68 on their final dive with a combined score of 302.28, over 8 points ahead of Italian divers Elena Bertocchi and Chiara Pellacani.
The pair started working together last year and have already claimed medals at the World championships. Mew Jensen worried that she would not be able to compete after a partial back fracture caused her to miss six weeks of diving. Speaking to The Telegraph, she described the obstacle:
"I didn’t think it was going to be possible. It meant the individual was off the table for me. I did my first line-up for this. You’ve got to push that doubt to the side. The team and Yasmin were completely supportive."Scarlett Mew Jensen
The divers' tears of joy at clinching the bronze medal were likely shared by many, since Britain had not won a medal in women's diving since 1960 and this marks the first time since 2004 that Britain has won a medal on the opening day of the Olympics.
Blood, sweat, and a silver medal
The second victory of the day went to cyclist Anna Henderson, who won silver in the time trial. Over the course of 32.4 km the 25-year-old cyclist stayed upright at each corner. This is particularly impressive in light of the crashes suffered by some cyclists on the rain-slicked course.
Henderson herself suffered injuries earlier this year. For two months after her February crash, she was sidelined from competition by a broken collarbone. Two weeks after her return to competition, she suffered the same injury. But she was indomitable. Cycling Weekly's Tom Davidson reported on her drive to succeed:
"I was pretty much back on my bike like three days after the surgery...Just the second one [collarbone break] mentally hurt a lot. It really took a lot to get back and get the motivation again. I always had Paris on my mind, and that really carried me through."Anna Henderson
It certainly got her through a win at Nationals and an outstanding performance in the Tour of Britain.
These extraordinary athletes are the first to medal and we look forward to many more as the Games progress in days to come.