Karl Marx and Adam Smith would have cheered avidly at the Diving World Cup two weeks ago in Beijing. Trailing China—which swept gold medals in seven of eight categories—were Russia, Canada, Great Britain, Ukraine and USA. In other words, the top six teams in the Men’s 3 Meter Synchronized event were evenly split between historically Communist and Free Market traditions.

How do the diving styles vary between these two systems? And how do they evoke the different training programs that got their divers to the Water Cube? I decided to take a closer look at the national training programs behind each set of divers.

Wang Feng and Qin Kai, the Chinese representatives, performed their dives with absolute precision: bodies angled like a geometric compass, legs glued together, feet pointed after years of ballet training. Their movements were synchronized from the moment they began to ascend the three-meter-high boards—which was even before the judges eyed them. Leon Taylor, of the Great Britain team, described the Chinese divers “as robots.” He wasn't the only one to find, as he put it, “something vaguely dehumanizing about their perfect symmetry. You’d think they were identical twins.”

Despite China’s achievements on that day, Zhou Jihong, director of the Chinese national diving team, afterwards told the official Xinhua News Agency that the World Cup was "just a training session.” Xinhua said that "Zhou makes it clear to China’s divers that their gold status is a temporary position." No surprise that Wang wasted no time basking in the limelight; he said he was already preparing to "get focused on [our] small errors and try to get rid of them.” 

China’s Olympic athletes are learning to live with the dual demands of both a regimented Soviet-styled system and the celebrity world of corporate endorsements, as described in an earlier post by Jonathan Ansfield. 

The Russian program, on the other hand, openly favors the “carrot”, and not the “stick,” approach these days. Moscow’s Olympic team members receive $500 worth of monthly allowances, described as“a good incentive to work hard” by Leonid Tyagachev, chairman of the Russian Olympic Committee, just prior to the Athens Games. At that point, the government had also promised tax-free bonuses—up to $50,000 for gold medalists.

This doesn’t mean Russian athletes are living off the fat of the land. The controlled, rigid take-offs and flips of Yuriy Kunakov and renowned careerist Dmitry Sautin evoked their severe, at times bare-bones, training approach.

In contrast, Canadians Arturo Miranda and Alexandre Despatie (a medaled soloist in his own right) are the product of a program which seems designed to keep the diver—no matter the level of skill—self-fulfilled and in pursuit of personal excellence. Divers training under this model come to the program of their own volition, and ideally decide to stay without governmental pressure or financial need (though commercial money no doubt helps). The Canadians performed the most graceful, carefree and lithe dives I’d seen that day.

After receiving their bronze medal, the duo seemed neither excited nor deflated. Miranda explained, “I am happy overall with our performance. We will do better next time." Despatie admitted that “we didn’t have the impression we dove so badly” even though they were in last place after the first two dives. Quite the lighthearted response from a team that just placed third globally after years of training.

Whereas China culls its 1.3 billion-strong population for ripe young talent to train throughout their youth, Great Britons Benjamin Swain and Nicholas Robinson-Baker began training together barely a year before ascending to their fourth place finish at the World Cup. Then again, the noticeably mature presence of the British duo made me feel that these were real people, with real pressures, sitting on their shoulders. The dives were a learned, cerebral precision. According to Swain, the pair’s relaxed, almost debonair, approach made all the difference. “We loved every minute of it, felt relaxed throughout and couldn’t wait for our next round of dives.”

Enjoyment seems an incentive for the U.S. team, as well. The home-page of the Indiana Diving program, where the States are now training their divers, opens with a letter to parents and divers declaring: “Let’s learn, train and most importantly have some fun!” It’s a contract between the program and the athlete, with the former telling the latter, “we appreciate your confidence in us.”

Unfortunately, the U.S. program has struggled recently: the American divers didn’t place in Athens, and in Beijing, Jevon Tarantino and Christopher Colwill yo-yo’d erratically in the clarity and coordination of their dives that day.

In fact, U.S. officials have considered shifting their strategy by taking a page or two from the Chinese approach. Increasingly, they've centralized their training in Indiana, where many hopefuls move to train full-time. And they’re starting to seek out promising girls and boys at a younger age.

As for the Ukrainian training program, there was no mention of their strategy. Their divers, Dmytrio Lysenko and Anton Zakharov, weren't interviewed in any news media I ran across. All I remember during their dives was being disturbed by spectators getting up to buy ice cream and pop corn before the Chinese took their turn on the boards again.