(Beijing February 21) The "Good Luck Beijing" 2008 16th FINA Diving World Cup entered its third day today. In the women's 10m synchronized platform preliminaries held this afternoon, Wang Xin/Chen Ruolin of China finished first with a total score of 361.98pts, followed by Emilie Heymans/Marie-Eve Marleau of Canada by a margin of 38.79pts.

In the first two rounds where all divers chose the same difficulty coefficient of 2.0, Wang/Chen ranked first with a score of 109.20pts, followed closely by Tania Cagnotto/Noemi Batki of Italy by a margin of 4.80 and Melissa Wu/Briony Cole of Australia with 102.60.

In the third round, Wang/Chen scored 77.40 in 107B (forward 3½ somersaults piked, DD 3.0). Emilie Heymans/Marie-Eve Marleau of Canada ascended to the second place with a score of 73.92 in 407C (inward 3½ somersaults, DD 3.2), and Paola Espinosa/Tatiana Ortiz rose to the third place with 74.88 in the same dive.

In their fourth dive Wang/Chen collected 82.56 in 407C (inward 3½ somersaults, DD 3.2), a temporary lead of 26.55 over Heymans/Marleau of Canada. Wu/Cole of Australia climbed up to the third place with 74.88 in the same dive.

In the last round, Wang/Chen were awarded the highest score of 92.82 for their 5253B (2½ somersaults 1½ twists piked, DD 3.4). Heymans/Marleau of Canada and Wu/Cole of Australia finished second and third respectively with the identical score of 80.58 in the same dive.

After the preliminaries, 12 pairs from China, Canada, Australia, Germany, Italy, UK, DPRK, Ukraine, USA, Japan, Mexico and Russia made the finals to be staged at 8:45 p.m. today, and the finals will be a five-round competition with the first two rounds under an average coefficient of difficulty of 2.0 and the other three unlimited.