Grace, 10, a scrap in red togs, was prowling with pointed toes along the one-metre springboard, bony knees bandaged with strapping tape and ponytail dripping down her back.
“Normal, human-sized steps,” coach Steve Gladding called, above the shouts and splashes ricocheting round West Wave pool in Henderson.
At the end of the board she paused, using her weight to set it flexing up and down in an easy rhythm.
Then she leapt.
As she propelled herself into the air, she drew her knees in towards her chest and rotated backwards towards the board, untucking and straightening her limbs just in time to pierce the water, a pin dropping.
At the edge of the pool, waiting her turn, was Shaye Boddington: muscular, dark-haired, and just a few training sessions away from getting on a plane to something that wasn’t even a pipe dream a year ago - the Commonwealth Games.
She stepped onto the board, taking measured steps out to the end.
As Grace did before her, she began flexing the board. Both the bounce and rebound were bigger, accompanied by the banging of the fulcrum at the opposite end, and when she leapt, she soared.
In the air, Boddington rotated so rapidly that it was hard to tell how many times she turned or which way she was facing when she plunged into the water a split second later.
The dive is called a reverse two-and-a-half tuck.
Diving during the Commonwealth Games will be held at the Optus Aquatics Centre on the Gold Coast Photo: AFP
The very first part of it is actually what Grace performed - a reverse dive, where the diver rotates backwards 180 degrees.
But Boddington adds two more somersaults to that, so by the time she enters the water, she’s rotated 900 degrees.
Even with the propulsion from the springboard, it requires a powerful diver to pull it off.
“There’s not many people in the world doing that, actually,” Gladding said.
It’s a dive not even Boddington herself was performing, last time she was in contention for the Commonwealth Games.
Now 31, she was just 17 when she was selected to represent New Zealand at the 2002 Manchester Games. She only missed out on competing because her citizenship - she was born in Zimbabwe - didn’t come through in time.
And then she dropped out of the sport completely.
“That whole time, I’d been struggling with an eating disorder, bulimia,” she said.
“It had been getting worse and worse, to the point where I could barely function.
“I left [diving] at a point where it almost wasn’t even a decision - it was a necessity.”
Shaye Boddington, diver, sank without trace.
It took her five years to get well again. She “got on with other interests in life”: she got a design degree, she got married and had a child, and she embarked on a career building tiny houses.
“I thought I was too old to ever come back to diving and I thought the break had been too long to even bother… There was still quite a lot of painful feelings attached to it.”
Just over a year ago, Boddington realised she had no record of her career to show her preschool daughter Hazel - no videos, no photos.
She moseyed down to West Wave with no agenda or assumptions - just an idea to see if she could capture a few easy dives on camera to show Hazel when she was older.
She wasn’t prepared for the flood of good memories that crashed over her.
“Even the smell as I walked into the pools… The smell of chlorine.”
And as she dived, she was amazed at how much stronger she was than when she was a teenager.
“That was without any training… That extra power I had, coupled with so many good feelings coming back, it just felt like it would be such a pity to stop there.”
Shaye Boddington qualified for the Commonwealth Games after less than 18 months back in the sport Photo: RNZ / Kate Newton
From across the pool, Steve Gladding, who was running a training session, looked up and recognised Boddington.
Former coach of Great Britain’s 2012 Olympic team, which included bronze medallist Tom Daley, Gladding has made a career of spotting and nurturing talent.
He moved to Auckland in 2015 and started putting primary school children through their paces in special PE classes, looking for the power and flexibility that indicated potential in the sport.
He had first met Boddington nearly 20 years ago, when she was 12 or 13, while she was training in South Africa and he was coaching - though he wasn’t her coach.
Now, watching her “muck-around session”, he saw what could be.
“She had an amazing power about her. It was really exciting to see.
“[I] called her over and said, ‘Okay, well, how serious are you about coming back?’”
She joined in the training session.
Within three or four months, the pair were starting to talk about a Commonwealth Games bid - defying Boddington’s age and her own expectations.
As an uncarded athlete, Boddington doesn’t have access to New Zealand’s high-performance system - which is why she trains at a public pool, taking turn-about on the springboard with a 10-year-old, while a dozen other divers in the squad tumble from the higher platforms.
What she does have is Gladding, her “calm high-energy person”.
Steve Gladding Photo: Supplied / NZ Olympic Committee
“”He’s learnt how to master his energy a little bit more than me, so I’ve got a lot to learn from him… I’m still a bowl of popcorn going off sometimes.”
During the training session, Gladding sat in a plastic chair on the very edge of the pool, leaning forward with his elbows resting on his knees and his fingers interlaced, the lines on his face deepening as he concentrated on each dive.
Each time Boddington emerged from the water she looked to him for approval, head cocked to one side and face scrunched up, and then they both craned to study a playback screen set up beside the pool, plugged into a phone that was filming everything.
She trains like this for about two hours, six days a week, in between fielding text messages about the best way to fit a balustrade.
That’s accompanied by hour-and-a-half gym sessions most of those days, to build strength and practise the acrobatic element of the sport through standing jumps and somersaults.
Boddington has had “an almighty climb” to be named in the Commonwealth Games diving squad after just 15 months back in training, Gladding said.
“To come back and do what she’s done is … an amazing achievement.
“She was a phenomenal talent as a youngster and putting that together now with how powerful she is, what we’ve got is a phenomenal athlete.”
Neither was too bothered by where she might place at the Commonwealth Games.
“If I can manage to just stay calm and enjoy the competition, that will be a success,” Boddington said.
“I haven’t been in it long enough to even know what to expect.”
She knew, too, that this second chance could be her last shot.
“I don’t know of any other people who’ve done it, but I guess I have a habit of not doing things the conventional way.”
Practice over, it was time to head home, and Boddington made for a back corridor that led to the pool complex exit.
There was a jaunt in her step, as though she was still striding along the springboard, out to the edge.
Main image: Shaye Boddington competes in the 2017 World Championships last July, only a few months back into full-time training (Getty Images)
