PARIS − Not making the U.S. Olympic team previously worked out nicely in 2024 for diving’s Sarah Bacon.

Had Bacon, 27, made the 2020 team, she would have retired from the sport. Instead, she and partner Kassidy Cook, 29, stayed together all the the way to the medal stand in Paris. The American duo won silver in Saturday’s 3-meter synchronized springboard competition at the Aquatics Centre, providing Team USA’s first medals of the Paris Games.

Chang Yani and Chen Yiwen of China won gold, and Great Britain’s Yasmin Harper and Scarlett Mew Jensen took the bronze when Australia’s team of Maddison Keeney and Anabelle Smith, who were within reach of Bacon and Cook, botched the final dive to fall to fifth place.

This was Bacon’s Olympic debut and Team USA’s first medal in women’s synchronized springboard since Kelci Bryant and Abby Johnston won silver in London in 2012.

Bacon, who will also compete in the individual springboard at the Paris Games, hails from Indianapolis and competed at the University of Minnesota. Cook is from The Woodlands, Texas and attended Stanford. This was her second appearance at the Olympics.

Cook and Bacon finished second at the U.S. Olympic trials in 2021, missing out on a ticket to Tokyo. At the time, Cook was competing through what she called a “pretty gnarly shoulder injury.”

“I wasn’t focused on my competition,” Cook said earlier this week in Paris. “I was focused on my pain. It left a bitter taste in my mouth.”

Initially, Bacon planned to retire from diving after the Tokyo Olympics.

“Other things got in our way of making that team,” she said prior to Saturday’s competition, “which was pretty devastating. … Not making the team kept me around diving, and now I am an Olympian.”

Since the women’s synchronized springboard competition was introduced in 2000, six of seven gold medals have been won by Chinese tandems. China has won every Olympic gold medal in women’s diving since 2004.

A world power in diving for decades, Team USA hasn’t had an Olympic gold medalist in the sport since David Boudia (men’s platform) in 2012.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Paris Olympics sees Team USA’s Sarah Bacon and Kassidy Cook win silver