FEATURE

A Long Drop Starts on the Low Side of a Pool

By quattro media




The long process of learning a new cliff dive.  In cliff diving, most elements are high: the
number of somersaults and twists, the entry speed, as well as of course the take-off height. However, when starting to build a new dive, the professional athletes of the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series go back to poolside and start with the ‘basic maths’ of their sport; breaking the dive into different parts, just to put it all together again when diving from 28m, and this includes various lead-ups and ‘building blocks’, and sometimes learning the hard way... Building a new dive is a long, creative and intense process. But it pays off!

“Building a dive all starts at the low levels in a pool and the low levels of your mind,” explains David Colturi, the best placed American in the current World Series (4th). When the sport’s most elite athletes go up for a new big dive, they always start at the low level springboards and platforms in the normal diving situation. As not all cliff diving manoeuvres fit into 3.5m or even 10m, they have to practice the dive in different parts; taking into account each of the key moments that are going to help them perform the dive successfully. So obviously take-off, mid-flight and entry are the three big parts. “No matter if you’re learning a flying reverse flip for the first time or a reverse double with five twists, you’re still going to break down the three big parts and you’re going to get them really, really solid so that you know that when you go up top you are going to perform these pieces correctly and perform the dive safely and successfully,” 26-year-old Colturi makes clear.

Thinking of something new, you have to start at square one and look at all your options. What are your strengths as a diver? How are you going to use that to work on whatever idea you have? Some athletes tend to stick to a certain category or type of dive; whether they’re rotating with lots of somersaults like Steve LoBue’s ‘quint half’ or Sergio’s Guzman’s ‘reverse quad’. And then there’re divers who are much more twisting oriented like Gary Hunt’s ‘triple 3 ½’, Blake Aldridge’s ‘big twist’ or even Orlando Duque, who’s more of a twister than he is a somersaulter. It’s a ground up process, anyway, which maybe starts in belts on a trampoline, like in a harness, just working through the movements. Then to the pool and do some lead-ups from different heights or, and here comes the tricky part, you may have to be creative to
get the height that you want. If you need to get on 8m or 12m or 13m, that requires building different apparatuses, like a box, a mini trampoline or even hydraulic lifts.



These lead-ups – a dive before the actual big dive that doesn’t have all the rotations and twists – are done from a lower height, but they are building blocks. “Basically, just like in the classroom when you learn basic maths, algebra and calculus and trigonometry and anything that goes further and further. It’s a building block and you’re learning as you go,” says Colturi, who’s currently working on the sport’s hardest dive (DD of 6.3), a reverse two somersaults with five twists, which would make him only the second athlete in the world to perform the trick. The first one was Blake Aldridge, the former Olympian, a dedicated athlete who comes back down to the poolside every time he learns a new dive, just to work his way up via the various heights, increasing the number of tricks with each metre of height: “It’s a very
long process to put a dive together and to learn a new dive is an even longer process. You really have to gradually build on each building block to be confident enough to go up on 27m and do a dive you’ve never done before. This takes a lot of courage, a lot of self-belief, a lot of strength and really the confidence that you’ve built over the long period of time doing all the lead-ups.”

What comes in here for Steven LoBue, the World Series ‘turbo spinner’ and the only athlete who can execute five somersaults in less than three seconds, is the mental aspect of cliff diving: “It’s a big separator of the real professional high divers and the ones that maybe have the physical talents but can’t mentally go up there and put the pieces together and do it safely. If you can do the trials and the technique in the pool on the lead-up platforms, then there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to do it from up top as physically it’s the same thing and you even do your tricks at the same speed as on the 10m platform; but mentally it’s a whole other situation, because if you step up on that high-dive platform and you look down 28 metres, you know the potential consequences.”

And just as the new dive is broken down into three segments, there are also three factors that influence the ability to learn these hard dives: repetition, confidence and experience. The more repetitions you have on your lead-ups, the more self-confident you get as you gain experience, mentally and physically.  Only when you’ve done your ‘homework’ properly, can you perform a cliff dive safely and successfully. “If you then experience this unique feeling of flying through the air, trying something new, challenging and conquering your fears and resurfacing out of the water successfully,” describes David Colturi, ”it’s a magical moment that none of us is ever going to forget."