The big chance

Their partnership is three years and a few medals old, but Greg Duncan and Tyler Downs haven’t had their chance at glory yet.

That comes next week, at the Paris Olympics. The former Boilermaker divers have ranked among the world’s best in the 3-meter synchronized dive at four international meets just this year, but the rest of the planet’s billions will be watching their next one. And that makes a difference.

“World Championships just doesn’t have the same name and hype around it,” Duncan said.

He and Downs practically brushed shoulders passing through Purdue’s diving program in 2021, when Downs was a freshman and Duncan was a fifth-year senior.

The timing coincided with an opening on Team USA for synchronized diving. A silver medalist was retiring, and the two decided they already dove similarly. Why not give it a chance?

They’ve been an uncommonly close pair since.

“It’s everything to be able to train with your partner,” Duncan said. “Before 2021 I did ‘synchro’ with a diver who went to Texas. So I would have to fly there, and we’d only train, like, once every two or three months. I’m able to come in every day with (Downs) and hang out with him outside of the pool. We get how each other’s minds work.”

Downs said his and Duncan’s styles resembled each other’s before they even started as partners.

“We don’t have to work on our ‘synchro’ at all,” Downs said. “It’s literally just our dives individually.”

Perfect synchronized diving takes its form when two divers step onto a blue springboard and become one, bouncing and bending knees, raising arms together before exploding upward. The human eye can flit back and forth between them as they rotate and compress on their descent. But, in all ways easily distinguishable in that moment, there is no difference between them.

The way Downs and Duncan get there is partially through friendly competition. If Downs misses a dive and sees Duncan nail his turn, it’s on. And when the intensity ratchets up, that interplay goes with it. The pair feel they’re better in big moments.

“We both step up in competition. He’s a f–ing all-star in comp,” Duncan said, nodding at his partner. “You just want to have faith in your partner, to know how he’s gonna step up. So, like, when we play pickleball with each other and we’re tied at the last point, and we win because he does something clutch, those things just add up to the partnership.”

They made a good duo, apparently, over the four hours they played at their coach’s house on the Fourth of July.

“We take it seriously,” Downs said. “We don’t like to lose. Obviously we all love each other so much, so it’s very relaxing to go out and exercise more than we already do, but to have fun.”

Downs said he learns from Duncan, who’s been doing synchro longer than he has. The 21-year-old competed at the Olympics when he was 17 on the 3-meter springboard dive, but the older Duncan has been waiting his whole career for this chance; he’s a rare first-time Olympian at age 25.

And he barely got this far at all.

In Knoxville, Tennessee at the Olympic trials, the two divers had to compete to earn the spot they had won for their country previously at World Championships. In international diving, a country’s competitors must first win against other nations at World Championships to secure a place at the Olympics. Duncan and Downs placed fourth there, in Tokyo last summer, to check that box for the U.S.

At domestic trials in June, they needed to finish first to represent the nation in Paris. Finals was confined to a single state’s universities, as Downs and Duncan battled a pair from Indiana University. They’d lost to them at a prior international competition, and posted remarkably consistent results to beat the Hoosiers after they mastered a difficult dive late in the competition.

The Purdue team did it, edging their competition by 2 points out of 800. When Downs and Duncan emerged from the pool afterward, while the scores were being calculated, they blinked the chlorine from their wide eyes until their hopes were confirmed.

They snapped to turn to each other and embraced, heart to heart, until they fell back into the water.