BEIJING - Jim McKay, the patron saint of the Olympics, used to say that the sports themselves don't matter. No, it's the competition that captivates us. Admittedly, he said this before there was an Olympic sport called "Synchronized Platform Diving." But I think he would have approved. Heck, when he was host of Wide World of Sports he made barrel jumping seem dramatic.

First, an explainer: Synchronized platform diving is the sort of idea that seems really good when you first think of it at 4 a.m. after eating pizza, but maybe not so much when you wake up the next morning. The idea is that two divers stand on a 10-meter platform - so we're talking about 33 feet in the air - then jump off at the same time like they're Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in "Lethal Weapon."

Then they're supposed to perform complicated dives in perfect synchronicity. Then, they're supposed to hit the water and not splash. Then they're supposed to wear the same clothes in public.

Now, I won't lie, I've never understood the synchronicity concept from the beginning, going back to synchronized swimming. I mean, I've never understood how doing exactly the same thing as someone else is a sport - I've always thought of that as, you know, my high school years. Plus, I have no idea how someone discovers a talent for this. I guess that when a parent says that famous line, "Well, if Billy jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you?" - the kid who responds, "Yes, I would, at precisely the same time and mirroring his every move," is a potential sync diver.

Still, the beauty of the Olympics is exactly what Jim McKay talked about. The game isn't the thing. The rules aren't the thing. You can walk around the Olympics, walk into any venue, walk into badminton or archery or canoeing, and if you open up your heart just a little bit, you can find tension and grace and turmoil and someone to root for.

In fact, that's how I happened upon synchronized platform diving. There was a competitor who looked like he was 14 years old. It turned out this is because the kid is 14 years old - his name is Thomas Daley, and he's from England, and he's some sort of diving prodigy. He started winning national diving competitions when he was 10. And he is apparently some sort teen sensation in England, like he's the lead singer of the Backflip Boys. And it isn't just in England.

"I have a lot of Chinese women and girls that follow me around a lot," Thomas says. "I don't know why."

Unfortunately, Daley and his 26-year-old partner, Blake Aldridge, did not perform well. I mean, you know, to the untrained eye it looked like did fine, like they were both doing more or less the same dives at pretty much the same time. But the judges gave them poor scores, which led to a classic and weird moment that, I suspect, could not happen at another sporting event like an Ultimate Fighting Championship. Before the sixth and final dive, Aldridge saw his mother in the crowd and asked her to call him so they could chat. And Daley freaked.

"What are you on the phone for?" he yelled, according to Aldridge. "We're in competition, We have another dive to do!"

"That's just Tom being over-nervous," Aldridge said afterward, which seemed unduly harsh, especially because he as the 26-year-old was the one who decided to talk to his mother in the middle of an Olympic competition.

On the other hand, the Australians - Robert Newberry and Matt Helm - looked older than half the people in the stands. This is because they have been diving since the early Clinton years, which is, in diving terms, about 400 years ago. They have both been through so many injuries that they retired before these Olympics. Then they thought, what the heck, why not give it one more shot, might make for a good movie someday. Helm was so excited about his final chance that he had the Chinese word for "perfection" tattooed on his left shoulder and the Olympic rings tattooed on his lower back.

They finished fourth, which sounds like it would be bad - you know, one spot away from the medal. But they've been in diving for so long they were actually fine with it. "I probably would have gone crazy if I got another bronze medal," Newberry said. "I already have three of them."

The divers from the United States, Thomas Finchum and David Boudia, are both from the Indianapolis area, which is apparently our nation's diving mecca. They came in with an excellent chance to win America's first diving medal of any kind since 2000, and they actually pushed themselves into position to win the bronze medal with some brilliant early syncing.

Then they had a semi-disastrous fifth dive that knocked them out of the medal race. It's hard to tell what a semi-disastrous synchronized dive looks like. You would expect it to be where one guy does a 3 ½ forward somersault in the pike position and his partner does, you know, a cannonball. Turns out, it looks a lot like other dives except the synchronicity is just a touch off, like it is when you're watching television and the sound and picture are just a touch off. Plus, there's too big a splash a the end. Finchum, it seems, "over-rotated." Or something.

So, in the end the competition came down to three teams. There was the Russian team, made up of two men who had serious family diving pressures. Dimitry Dobroskok has an older brother who dive internationally. And Glem Galperin's father Sergey Grigoriev Galperin is the Russian Master of Sport of International Standing for diving, which sounds like an impressive title, you know, as far as diving goes. They were in position to challenge for the gold but then had an even more disastrous dive than Finchum and Boudia - Dobroskok had a dive that caused more of a splash than Beatles in '64.

"I made a mistake, yes," he said.

The Germans, Sascha Klein and Patrick Hausding, needed a brilliant final dive to clinch a medal. Up on the platform, with Enya music playing over the loudspeakers and a full stadium watching closely - really, there was not an empty seat in the houe - Klein and Hausding talked to each other, like they were psyching each other up. Maybe one was saying to the other, "OK, just do exactly what I do." Whatever they said, they nailed the dive - it was the best dive of the whole competition according to the judges and the various diving experts around us.

"Stupendous," the German journalist behind us shouted, a great word.

Finally, though, the synchronized diving belonged to the Chinese pair, Lin Yue and Huo Liang. Lin and Huo are both still very young - 17 and 18 - but both were chosen for their sports a long time ago. In China (well, really in most countries, but especially in China leading up to these Games) athletes are matched up to their sports at a very young age. Lin began diving at 4 in his home of Guandong. Divers, according to reports, are chosen that young because it's before they can develop a fear of heights. That's a bit creepy really. Huo started a little later because, at first, coaches thought he would grow to be too short and rejected him.

Early on, they connected on what the judges called a perfect and perfectly synchronized dive - 10s across the board - and it sent the crowd into a frenzy. They never relinquished the lead. China is hoping to sweep all the diving gold medals, so there is an enormous amount of pressure on the divers. Lin and Huo seemed to respond to it. Anyway, their dives looked the same. And even after it ended, they were in sync.

"I performed to my normal level," Lin said.

"I am satisfied with our performance," Huo said.