Bronze medals for Heatly, Thornton and Kothari at World Junior Diving Championships

Three SportsAid athletes won bronze medals at the World Junior Diving Championships last week in Penza, Russia, where James Heatly and Sam Thornton finished third in the 3m synchro and European champion Kyle Kothari finished third in the 10m platform.

James (SportsAid Awards 2012, Bank of Scotland Local Heroes, and 2014, Moffat Trust - see photo) and Sam (SportsAid Yorkshire & Humberside Awards 2010 to 2014) were first to the podium on the second day of the competition when they narrowly missed out on a silver medal to the hosts, Russia, with a score of 305.88.

Kyle was up on the last day with a brilliant performance in the final to move up from eighth place in the preliminaries to finish ahead of America’s Jordan Windle in fourth. His success in Penza caps a fantastic year for the former gymnast who in July was named as SportsAid’s athlete of the month.