Many foreign divers have been showing the highest levels of difficulty in their dives in recent competitions. But Chinese diving officials insist they don't need to increase the degrees of difficulty to ensure their team's success and need only to improve the precision of their current dives.
"The Chinese team won't try to practice for higher difficulty degrees, but to strengthen the quality and stability of the dives," said Zhou Jihong, leader of China's national diving team.
"Some of the foreign divers are striving for highest difficulty levels. There will be no weak divers at the Olympic Games."
At the FINA Diving World Cup last month, the highest difficulty degree - and highest score - in the men's 3m springboard came from 21-year-old Yahel Castillo of Mexico, who was only 0.30 points behind China's world champion Qin Kai to take the bronze. His 3.9 dive - the most difficult dive attempted up to that point - claimed the highest score of 105.30 and lifted him to third place.
His compatriot Paola Espinosa was the only one in the women's 10m platform to use two dives with the current highest difficulty level of 3.4. She claimed bronze at the event, after China's Chen Ruolin and Wang Xin.
In the men's 10m platform, which is considered a weak point of the Chinese team, Sascha Klein from Germany grabbed the gold with the highest total degree of difficulty. It was the only gold medal that China missed at the World Cup, which also served an important Olympic qualifier.
"At the semifinal of the men's 10m platform at the Grand Prix, one diver from the US even tried a dive with a difficulty degree of 4.1. Although he didn't quite pull it off, we can see that some of the foreign divers are planning to clinch the gold with high difficulty," Zhou said.
The top eight divers in the finals won qualification for the Beijing Games. Each national federation can submit its final list of divers before the June 23 deadline.