Beijing, 23 Feb - Comments from the top three finishers after the men's 10m platform preliminaries at the National Aquatics Center.

Zhou Luxin (CHN) - 1st place

On Thomas Daley (GBR):
"We have met in competitions once or twice before. His performance is quite steady, but it's difficult to say whether he will be the one of our greatest opponents for now. Everyone gets the chance to perform perfectly once."

On his performance:
"Actually I am not satisfied with my performance today, not even for any single dive. Being scored between 8 and 10 for a single dive is normal, and the result depends on your condition. The last dive was better, but the first five dives were not satisfactory."

On his expectations for the finals:
"It's early to say right now since I have not yet gone through the semifinals. I will likely be a little nervous in the finals, but I am confident I will be better. The gold is my goal."

On his hobbies:
"I love basketball and football. The Houston Rockets are my favourite NBA team."

On his training:
"We train around 7 hours per day, and sometimes more than 8 or 9 hours."

Lin Yue (CHN) - 2nd place

On his performance:
"My performance was average. Some dives came out better than others. Everything is normal in these competitions, including mistakes."

On his fourth dive (207C, DD 3.3, scoring 61.05) and his fifth dive (307C, DD 3.4, scoring 98.70):
"I was not affected by the result of the fourth dive. I didn't think about the points, I remained focused on the execution of the later dives and did't think about the points before, and the only thing that I focused was the execution of later dives. "

On his personality:
"I think I am a little shy."

Matthew Mitcham (AUS) - 3rd Place

On his fifth dive (6243D, DD 3.2, scoring 75.20):
"I maintained the armstand for a long time before I took off. It was mainly because this was a new dive for me. I just tried to calm down and to focus. I have only been practicing that dive for two weeks."

On the diver who impressed him most in the preliminaries:
Thomas Daley from Great Britain definitely. He is so young and promising."

On his future education plans:
"I graduted from high school two years ago. After the Beijing Olympics, I will go to university. Science was my strongest subject in high school and I hope to major in medical science. I want to go to a university in Sydney, but it is too far away from my training pool."

On his linguistic ability:
"I can speak English and French, as well as a little Chinese. Wo de sheng ri, san yue er hao (My birthday is the 2nd of of March)."

On his first time standing on the platform:
"I was 15 at the time. It was a little scary. At first, I just made a straight jump, or a 100. After a few days, I began experimenting with some new dives such as 103 and 207."