Olympic diving medallist Meaghan Benfeito finds synchronicity with McKay

CALGARY — Meaghan Benfeito is working on her vertical.

The three-time Olympic bronze medallist in diving wants more height off the board from her five-foot-one frame, so she can get as much air time as her new young partner before they hit the water.

Benfeito and Roseline Filion won synchronized diving bronze in the women’s 10-metre platform in both the 2012 and 2016 Summer Olympics.

Benfeito, from Montreal, also won individual platform bronze in 2016. Filion’s retirement a few months after the Rio Games was an emotional wrench and a significant physical adjustment for Benfeito.

She and Filion had grown up together in diving and were longtime friends. After Filion’s retirement, Benfeito was paired with Calgary’s Caeli McKay, who is over a decade younger and three inches taller.

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Benfeito struggled getting her head around Filion’s absence on the tower, while McKay had to overcome her awe of diving with a decorated Olympian.

“I didn’t really know how to handle doing synchro with someone else,” Benfeito said Wednesday in Calgary. “We were able to talk about it, move on and become a team ourselves. It’s not Meaghan and Rosie anymore, it’s Meaghan and Caeli.”

Said McKay: “I was very star struck starting out with Meaghan. She was always on TV and I never really got to see her in person. She was a superstar in my mind. Getting acquainted and realizing she’s just a normal person with a lot of talent and a lot of medals was a big step in our relationship.”

Chemistry and communication clicked when the duo finished fourth at the 2017 world championship.

They won a silver medal at last month’s Commonwealth Games on the Gold Coast, Australia, where Benfeito, 29, also won individual silver.

Diving alongside 18-year-old McKay puts physical demands on Benfeito that Filion didn’t, as Benfeito and Filion were the same height and size.

“I have to try to jump higher. You don’t want to make Caeli jump lower and miss her dive,” Benfeito explained. “I’ve been doing a lot of exercises in the gym to get my legs a little stronger. She’s three and a half inches taller than me.

“She jumps super high. She may be younger, but she’s strong and that’s something I need to work on. Hopefully by the Olympics, it should be OK.”

The two women are competing in the FINA Diving Grand Prix Canada Cup starting Thursday at Calgary’s Repsol Centre, where McKay grew up diving before moving to Montreal to train with Benfeito two years ago.

Montreal springboard star Jennifer Abel, winner of a career eight world championship medals, will also be among the 120 divers from 19 countries competing in Calgary.

The Canadian team has 22 divers in the four-day competition. The preliminaries and semifinals of the 10-metre platform and three-metre springboard events are Thursday and Friday followed by finals Saturday and Sunday.

Diving Canada chief technical director Mitch Geller says the host team is capable of producing six to eight medals in Calgary.

Abel is coming off a springboard bronze and mixed synchro gold with Francois Imbeau-Dulac of Saint-Lazare, Que., at a World Series event last week in Kazan, Russia.

The four-stop World Series is a more compact, exclusive competition of about 50 divers, while a Grand Prix features a much larger international field, Geller explained.

“The Grand Prix, you can have 112, 115 divers,” he said. “It’s a really broad representation of what’s out there in the world and it doesn’t preclude the World Series divers.”

The Canadian team is gearing up for June’s World Cup in China, and the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo now on the distant horizon.

Geller feels Benfeito and McKay are definite medal contenders in 2020, and are a better synchro match in some ways than Benfeito and Filion were.

“The way they move is more similar. They’re very quick movers,” he explained. “Their entries are better matched in that they both get in the water extremely clean. Rosie, probably her biggest challenge was getting in the water without bringing up a splash.

“When you see Meaghan and Caeli do a front and three and a half pike and perform a disappearing act when they hit the water, that makes your hair stand up.”

Donna Spencer, The Canadian Press

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