With an immaculate display of dives, Gary Hunt, the season’s dominating athlete, scored highest in each of the day’s three rounds and bettered his own point record by 14.30 points to an all-time high score of 548.20 points. Literally skipping to first place, the ‘brilliant Brit’ settled old scores with the venue in Italy’s south by successfully performing a running take-off. The World Series’ most experienced athlete – 41-year-old Orlando Duque (480.20pts.) – secured this year’s fifth podium finish on second to keep his closest competitor in check. Mexico’s style master Jonathan Paredes (477.85pts.) defied the odds of the final round’s lowest degree of difficulty by completing the podium in Italy.
After the second-to-last competition the fight in the overall rankings gets tighter as only the season’s best six athletes will be granted a permanent spot in a 2016 Series. Behind the leading trio of Hunt, Duque and Paredes, five athletes are battling it out with Andy Jones (530pts.) sitting in the longed for sixth spot. Can Russia’s Artem Silchenko (410pts.), the leader after the seeding round, or Czech’s Michal Navratil (400pts.) push the American off his position in the final stop of the 2015 season?
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