DIVER Ben Swain was unable to repeat his World Cup heroics in the Eindhoven arena. Former WGC schoolboy Swain and men s 3m synchro partner Nick Robinson-Baker stunned the world with their performance in Beijing last month to qualify Great Britain for this

DIVER Ben Swain was unable to repeat his World Cup heroics in the Eindhoven arena.

Former WGC schoolboy Swain and men's 3m synchro partner Nick Robinson-Baker stunned the world with their performance in Beijing last month to qualify Great Britain for this summer's Olympics.

The British champions finished fourth against the world's elite synchro pairs and thrust themselves into serious Olympic medal contention.

However, the Brits were unable to recreate their performance at last month's World Cup in the LEN European Diving Championships in Holland.

The pair, competing together at their first European Championships, finished in fourth place after the preliminaries.

That should have been a springboard to success.

But going into the final they didn't look at their best and after dropping marks on their first required dive, they found it difficult to move up the board and found themselves unable to challenge for a medal.

The Brits eventually finished in seventh place in the final with a total of 375.99 points.

"That was not the performance we were hoping for here," said former Monk's Walk School pupil Swain, whose family live in Welwyn.

"We have been feeling tired this week but we thought we had a better performance in us."

Swain, 21, started his career with the Beaumont Diving Academy in Hatfield before moving to the City of Sheffield club.

Despite missing out on European glory on Saturday, Swain is remaining focussed on achieving his goal of going to the Beijing Olympics this August.

He said: "We have a plan in place in preparation for the Olympic Games this summer and we are going to stick to that and not let a bad performance here put us off because we know we have better dives in us."

Taking the top spot were Olympic medallist Dmitry Sautin and Yuriy Kunakov with 440.70.

Silver was taken by 2006 European champions Tobias Schellenberg and Andreas Wels from Germany with 413.90 and the bronze was claimed by Ukraine's Dmytro Lysenko and Anton Zakharov with 406.50 points.

Earlier in the week Swain had failed to progress to the final of the men's 3m springboard.

He missed his entries in two of his dives to finish in 16th place.