Athens � Alexandre Despatie of Laval, Que., is in third place heading into Tuesday afternoon's three-metre springboard diving final, advancing easily out of the morning semi-final, although teammate Philippe Comtois of Montreal failed to qualify.

Despatie, 19, put up a score of 254.73 in the semifinals, trailing Dmitri Sautin of Russia at 256.38 and Peng Bo of China with 256.17.

"Yesterday it felt like tomorrow was never going to come, but this morning was good," said Despatie. "I had a good semifinal and I'm going to go get ready for tonight."

Despatie was first after Monday's preliminaries but finalists drop those scores and take only their semi-final points with them into the medal round.

"I have to forget about that score because that was the prelims and not its officially scratched out of anything," said Despatie. "It's out. So the only points that are carried on are the ones we just dove for."

The divers with the top 12 scores from both the preliminaries and semi-finals moved on to the final.

Comtois, 12th after the preliminaries, just missed advancing, finishing 13th with 629.22 points. He was just 1.38 back of Mexico's Rommel Pacheco.

Despatie is the world champion on the 10-metre tower and is a gold-medal hopeful in that event later this week.

But he is also a medal contender on the springboard, in which he was ranked No. 1 by FINA, the world governing body of swimming, on the World Cup circuit this year.

put on line by SVP