Gophers senior Sarah Bacon won her third consecutive NCAA championship in 1-meter diving, posting a total score of 357.20 Thursday on the second day of the NCAA women's swimming and diving meet in Greensboro, N.C.
Gophers diver Sarah Bacon wins her third NCAA 1-meter title
She also won the event in 2018 and 2019 before taking a year off.
By Rachel Blount, Star Tribune
March 19, 2021 at 4:37AM
Bacon, who took last year off from college to train toward the Tokyo Olympics, moved into the lead with a high-scoring third dive and beat runner-up Aranza Vazquez-Montano of North Carolina by 8.75 points. Bacon joins Florida's Megan Neyer as the only women to win three consecutive 1-meter crowns. Neyer's string ran from 1982-84, in the first three years of the NCAA women's championship.
A native of Indianapolis, Bacon also will compete for an NCAA title in 3-meter diving Friday at the Greensboro Aquatic Center.
"It means a lot to me," Bacon told ESPN, referring to her third title. "Our team has faced a lot of adversity this year, so I'm just trying to make every meet count and do my best with the opportunities that I'm getting."
Bacon topped the standings in Thursday's preliminaries with a score of 341.85, more than six points ahead of Arizona's Delaney Schnell and nearly 25 points up on Anne Fowler of Indiana. Eight divers advanced to the finals, with each doing six dives.
After two dives, Bacon sat in third place, then scored 62.40 points on a reverse 1½ somersault pike. That vaulted her into the lead, about four points ahead of Brooke Schultz of Arkansas.
Cool and consistent, Bacon held about a 9½-point margin over Vazquez-Montano following the fourth round and maintained a similar margin the rest of the way. Her final dive, a forward 2½ somersault pike, earned a score of 62.40 and a big fist pump from Gophers diving coach Wenbo Chen.
Bacon finished second on the 1-meter board as a freshman in 2017 before winning the championship in each of the next two years. As a junior in 2019, she set the NCAA meet record in the event with a score of 363.20. She also finished fifth in 3-meter as a junior in 2019, her highest placing in that event.
Later that year, Bacon earned her first world championships medal, a silver on the 1-meter board. Though 1-meter is not an Olympic event, the medal represented a breakthrough for the U.S., which had not won a world championships medal in an individual women's diving event since 2005.
Over the past two years, Bacon has worked to improve her performance in 3-meter in the hope of making the U.S. team for this summer's Tokyo Olympics.
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Rachel Blount, Star Tribune
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