Voluntary vs Optional Dives: What's The Difference?
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In general, voluntaries are the "easy" dives that divers will compete in competitions. There is typically a limit to the degree of difficulty for voluntaries which differs from optionals.
Optionals are a diver's hardest dives that they have in their dive list.
Those are the basics, but there are nuances and complexities to how this affects divers at different levels.
Why voluntaries exist
They exist so that competitions can balance the test between execution and difficulty.
If one diver can do much harder dives at baseline, their "easy" dives may be technically more difficult than an opponent's. And if there was no standardization at all, meets would be won by whoever attempts the most somersaults, and clean technique would matter less.
Having rules around voluntaries prevents that. Everyone is doing comparable difficulty for half the list, so the only thing left to score on is how well you did it.
Which means voluntaries are where execution can matter a lot. This is also true because a diver with superior fundamentals and voluntaries will carry more points into finals at their competition. And that can be the difference between winning and losing.
Why optionals exist
Optionals are where difficulty becomes strategy.
Since they count at full DD, a diver can be strategic. Throw a harder dive and a mediocre execution still scores well. Throw an easier one and it needs to be close to perfect.
This is what happened in the 2009 World Championships. Tom Daley competed lower difficulty dives compared to the others in the meet, but executed them so perfectly that mistakes by others doing harder dives cost them the meet.
If you want the math behind how DD multiplies into the final score, that's in how diving scoring works, and the full difficulty table is on the DD chart.
The rules vary a lot by level
This is important, and it's why you need to know the rules of the competition you are in.
The number of voluntaries and optionals required, the specific difficulty cap, and how many dive groups you have to cover all differ between age group, high school, NCAA, and international competition.
How it shapes what you train
Because voluntaries are capped, the only way to gain points on them is to make them beautiful. That means the dives you might think of as easy and boring are the ones deserving the most technical attention. A back dive that scores 8s instead of 6s is worth a lot of points when you consider the difference across all 5 voluntary dives you do.
6s for all voluntaries is 162 points, and 8s would give a diver 216 points.
Over a 50 point difference when you pay attention to the details.
Meanwhile the temptation on optionals is to keep adding difficulty. Sometimes that's right. But a harder dive you can't land consistently is worth less than an easier one you can, and the DD gain doesn't really cover bad execution.
Other things you're probably wondering
- DG