Knight-Wisdom hopes to make CAC splash

BARRANQUILLA, Colombia:

Yona Knight-Wisdom, who scaled new frontiers to represent Jamaica in the 3km Springboard Diving at the Olympic Games, is banking on a changed strategy to garner better results..

"I've been working on my new dive," said Knight Wisdom, who arrived here on Tuesday afternoon for competition at the 23rd Central American and Caribbean Games.

"There's two of them ... and they're both coming on well," he said of his new diving strategies. "It's been a combination of how to train them properly and feeling comfortable in training.

"It's getting there slowly, it's getting there, but they're not easy dives, especially for a person of my height, so that's the main challenge and as I keep doing it, it gets better in training so it will get better and better in competition," he explained.

Coaching him through the challenge is Rebecca Gallantree, who explained that all this being done to maximise his scoring potential.

"The change has come by solving his degree of difficulty, which will give him the potential to score higher because they're hard dives," Gallantree explained. "So if he does them well then he can score higher than doing the easy dives well."

She added: "He's come really far. There's still a little bit more work to go, but hopefully we can use this event and progress those dives further."

Knight-Wisdom, who recently competed at the World Cup in Wuhan, has no lofty expectations for CAC, but said he has been working hard and wants to end the season on a high.

"I'm looking forward to finishing my season pretty strongly, as strongly as I possibly can," he said.

"In terms of expectation I'm not coming into the competition with any expectation because I don't know what the competition is going to be like here. I'm just here to enjoy myself, have a good time and continue my preparations all the way through to qualifying for Tokyo 2020."

Looking back, Knight-Wisdom expressed some amount of dissatisfaction with his performances this season. Still, he harbours hope for improvements.

"They've been a little bit inconsistent, not terrible, but not as good as I was hoping for and I am still a bit frustrated by certain performances throughout the year, particularly the Commonwealth Games," he said.

"So I'm coming into this one just hoping to improve and learn from what I've done before and just continue on the path that I built last year."