Men's 3 metre springboard competition at the Beijing2008 Summer Olympics was held from August 18 to August 19, at the Beijing National Aquatics Center. It was an individual diving competition, with dives performed from a flexible springboard three metres above the surface of the water.
The individual diving competitions all consist of three rounds. In the first, the 29 divers each perform six dives. The top 18 divers advance to the semifinals. Each diver again performs six dives, and the top 12 divers from among those dives advance to the finals. Preliminary scores are ignored at this point, as only the semifinal scores are considered in advancement. In the final round, the divers perform a final set of six dives, with the scores from those dives (and only those dives) used to determine final ranking.
Seven judges evaluate each dive, giving the diver a score between 0 and 10 with increments of 0.5; scores below 6.0 or above 9.5 are rare. The highest and lowest score from each judge are dropped. The remaining five scores are summed, multiplied by 0.6, and multiplied by the degree of difficulty of the dive to give the total score for the dive. Scores from each dive in the round are summed to give the round score.
