BEIJING | Jim McKay, the patron saint of the Olympics, used to say that the sports themselves don&#8217;t matter. No, it&#8217;s the competition that captivates us. Now, admittedly, he said this before there was an Olympic sport called &#8220;Synchronized Platform Diving.&#8221; But I think he would have approved. Heck, when he was host of &#8220;Wide World of Sports&#8221; he made barrel jumping seem dramatic.</p><p>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 &#8212; so we&#8217;re talking about 33 feet in the air &#8212; then jump off at the same time as if they&#8217;re Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in &#8220;Lethal Weapon.&#8221;</p><p>Then they&#8217;re supposed to perform complicated dives in perfect synchronicity. Then, they&#8217;re supposed to hit the water and not splash. Then they&#8217;re supposed to wear the same clothes in public.</p><p>Now, I won&#8217;t lie, I&#8217;ve never understood the synchronicity concept from the beginning, going back to synchronized swimming. I mean, I&#8217;ve never understood how doing exactly the same thing as someone else is a sport &#8212; I&#8217;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, &#8220;Well, if Billy jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you?&#8221; &#8212; the kid who responds, &#8220;Yes, I would, at precisely the same time and mirroring his every move,&#8221; is a potential sync diver.</p><p>Still, the beauty of the Olympics is exactly what Jim McKay talked about. The game isn&#8217;t the thing. The rules aren&#8217;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.</p><p>In fact, that&#8217;s how I happened upon synchronized platform diving. There was a competitor who looked as if he were 14 years old. It turned out this is because the kid is 14 years old &#8212; his name is Thomas Daley, and he&#8217;s from England, and he&#8217;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, as if he&#8217;s the lead singer of the Backflip Boys. And it isn&#8217;t just in England.</p><p>&#8220;I have a lot of Chinese women and girls that follow me around a lot,&#8221; Thomas says. &#8220;I don&#8217;t know why.&#8221;</p><p>Unfortunately, Daley and his 26-year-old partner, Blake Aldridge, did not perform well. I mean, you know, to the untrained eye it looked as if did fine, as if 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.</p><p>&#8220;What are you on the phone for?&#8221; he yelled, according to Aldridge. &#8220;We&#8217;re in competition, We have another dive to do!&#8221;</p><p>&#8220;That&#8217;s just Tom being over-nervous,&#8221; 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.