Fear and safety – two major parts of cliff diving. The conditions on Portugal’s Azores islands are unforgiving – a pure cliff face with only a tiny ledge to take off from, you need to jump out and clear a few metres to meet the safe landing point, gusty winds might destabilise your handstand position high above the water, and the choppy sea can unexpectedly extend your flight or hit you sooner than you expect. Of course you are afraid, even when you’re amongst the best in the world. You’re 27 metres above the sea and you’ll flip and twist your way down to the concrete-like water in the next three seconds. In this moment, fear is a cliff diver’s best friend.
“Looking at the platform, my heart beats faster, my hands sweat, the body reacts immediately, it’s telling you to relax,” explains cliff diving legend Orlando Duque, “that fear is good, I like it. It helps me focus, it helps me concentrate.” Reading this it becomes obvious that fear is part of this sport that involves diving acrobatically from great heights. “Fear never leaves you,” says rookie Jonathan Paredes, who knows what he’s talking about. No training in Ireland, no training in Portugal, only diving during competition.
Why? “Everything is better under pressure. I know I have to do my dives in the competition, there is no option.” The 24-year-old Mexican is not the exception to the rule in the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series, but one of the best in the elite group of athletes. For these daring men, fear is a natural instinct that causes the organism to seek safety and may cause a release of adrenaline. Psychologically, this has the effect of increased strength and heightened senses such as hearing, smell, and sight. Never lose your focus, sense everything around you and be aware of the changing conditions. Even triple World Series champion Gary Hunt has to go through an inner conflict before each dive: “When you are on the end of the board everything in your body is telling you to stop doing it, you have so many doubts, your mind is just saying ‘you don’t need to do that dive, why are you doing this dive’, and it’s a real difficult challenge to not listen to those voices and to just tell yourself to go.”
So what gives these athletes the confidence to launch from the equivalent of an eight-storey building over and over again, pushing the limits of the sport to new heights? It’s more or less two factors that support the athletes in overcoming their fear – experience and the safety precautions. Unlike in regular diving, where you’re mostly indoors in a controlled environment, cliff diving challenges the athletes anew at every location. “You need to be able to adapt really quick, you have to be able to make changes and that only comes with experience. After learning and feeling that speed of the fall, being able to react faster, being able to finish the dive a little bit faster, that comes from repetition, from doing so many. It’s something that only comes over time,” says Colombian Duque.
After almost 20 years in the sport, he’s come to appreciate a rock-solid platform; something the World Series’ sports director, Niki Stajkovic, tries to provide to the satisfaction of his athletes. Another fact is a whole team of experienced scuba divers waiting for the divers in the water. Always ready to help in case something goes wrong. “They are the first ones who have contact with me when I have a bad landing.
They are the first people I see and I can just show them ‘help me’, ‘come to me’, ‘hold me’,” describes Michal Navratil, from the Czech Republic, “the first thing on the platform is I look down and see those guys waiting for me.”
“Every diver learns to put previous accidents behind them because otherwise we would not be able to go up there and do it. Once you start thinking about accidents and what could happen on the platform it’s very hard to take off,” says Gary Hunt, for whom putting mistakes in the back of his mind is a real challenge. And the best strategy to correct things like the loss of orientation or bad landings is to take the dive apart, and figure out what happened. Then go straight back up on the platform and try again,” says Orlando Duque.
For those who ‘play the game’ of cliff diving successfully, fear is an essential part of their professional lives, no matter what dive they do, simple or difficult. “There’s a certain amount of fear that you take with you up on the platform,” concludes Gary Hunt, the most successful athlete in the World Series to date, “but knowing what a great feeling it is doing a successful dive makes me get off of the platform.”
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