Tufts Daily 3/18/10: Diving | Unlikely pair of Jumbo divers heads to nationals. (Includes video) Gardel grew up in Wayland, Mass., where she also was a youth gymnast. When Gardel’s hometown gym closed down during her seventh-grade year, she and her identical twin sister Melissa tried many sports before settling on diving during freshman year of high school. Gymnastics is the Gardel twins’ first love (Lindsay still maintains that if she could give up diving today for gymnastics, she would), but diving, with its focus on acrobatic motion, proved to be a worthy substitute. “Melissa and I were very hyperactive kids, and when we quit [gymnastics], we tried soccer, track, pole vaulting,” Linday Gardel said. “Our high school didn’t have gymnastics, but we had a friend on the diving team, and he basically dared us to come to practice. So we did, and it was the closest we could get to gymnastics.” The sisters spent their childhood doing all kinds of activities together, including a five-summer stint in a local circus troupe, where the duo’s “adagio” routine — one of the twins would lift up the other, who would engage in an array of acrobatic endeavors — dazzled audiences.