With the European Aquatics Diving Championships Antalya 2025 set to start on Thursday (May 22) we take a look at the history of the event…

1 – Antalya is hosting the eighth stand-alone edition of the European Diving Championships. Turkiye will become the fifth country to host the separate Championships after Italy, Germany, Ukraine and Poland, which staged the seventh edition as part of the 2023 European Games.

This will be the first time Turkiye has staged the separate European Diving Championships, although in 1999 Istanbul staged the overall European Championships in which diving took place.

2 – The first separate European Diving Championships were held in 2009 in Turin, involving 10 events. The team event was added when Turin hosted the second edition of the stand-alone Championships in 2011. Synchronised mixed events on 3m springboard and 10m platform were added in 2017 when Kyiv hosted the fifth stand-alone edition.

3- Germany tops the all-time medal table in European Championship diving, having won a total of 161 medals – including 59 golds – since the first edition at Budapest in 1926.

At those inaugural Championships the two diving events – the men’s 3m springboard and men’s 10m platform – were won respectively by Germany’s Arthur Mund and Hans Luber. The latter diver, who had earned Olympic platform silver at the 1912 Stockholm Games, added a second platform gold at the following year’s European Championships in Bologna.

4 – The women’s programme was established at the 1927 Championships and platform gold was won by Britain’s Isabelle White, a bronze medallist at the Stockholm Olympics, who went on to compete at the 1920, 1924 and 1928 Games. Although she had not been selected for the British team in Bologna, White decided to travel to the championships independently.

After retiring in 1930 she was elected vice president of the Amateur Diving Association and she served as a diving judge at the 1948 London Olympics. In 1928 the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News had written: “Miss Belle White, whose diving is really a thing of beauty, strongly advocates it as a panacea for all ills, including care and worry.”

5 – Among the entrants in Antalya will be Ukraine’s 19-year-old Oleksii Sereda, who will be seeking to add to his current collection of five European golds.

At the 2019 edition of the Championships in Kyiv he became the youngest European champion in either swimming or diving when he won the 10m platform at the age of 13 years and seven months – three months younger than Britain’s Tom Daley when he won the 10m platform at the Eindhoven edition in 2008.

Mike Rowbottom for European Aquatics