The best diver from great heights

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Gary Hunt is 38 years old and since 2010 he has always won, except twice when he finished second, the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series, the international event of diving from a height which for males is always between 26 and 28 meters, more than double the maximum height foreseen in the Olympic trials. For physical, technical and environmental reasons, diving from those heights is almost a separate sport from the Olympic diving from 10 meters.

In dominating the discipline for more than a decade, Hunt invented new dives and approaches, others only followed years later, and he still beats opponents almost half his age. “He’s the Michael Jordan, the Muhammad Ali and the Tiger Woods” of high-height diving, said American diver Steven LoBue of him.

Hunt is a private person, who uses social media sparingly and who doesn’t correspond to the idea that many probably have of an athlete in an extreme sport. In a long article dedicated to him, the Guardian lo presented as a quiet and old-fashioned guy, very competitive and attentive to how he trains, but also as a carefree man, who eats heavily before a competition and drinks a lot after; one who uses trophies as vases, an athlete without an agent and with far fewer sponsors than he might have.

Hunt also won the 2022 World Series, which remained open until the last dive, and does not seem to have any intention of retiring. Indeed, he even made up his mind to participate in the 10-meter platform diving competitions at the 2024 Olympics.

Born in 1984 and raised near Leeds, England, Hunt got into diving around the age of ten, after trying dancing and swimming, the sports his older sisters did. However, he did not have a particular talent for swimming nor the desire to devote himself to monotonous training in the lane, as he told the Guardian. However, it was precisely from those lanes that he saw the divers and decided to dedicate himself to it, with ever better results.

In the more traditional and canonical dives, those from the three meters of the springboard or from the ten meters of the platform, Hunt was good, among the best in the United Kingdom, but not enough to reach the Olympics. When he was already over twenty he was beaten by 11-year-old Tom Daley, who later won a gold medal at the Tokyo Olympics. He therefore had to make do to earn a living and, like several other divers, he found work in shows, events or theme parks: for example, playing a pirate who, at a certain point in the exhibition, found himself having to jump into the water from several meters of height.

At the World Series organized and sponsored by Red Bull – a brand that has long and heavily focused on its link with extreme sports – Hunt arrived at the age of twenty-four, with almost no experience in diving over 20 meters and above all after a couple of difficult years following the death of Gavin Brown, his diving partner and close friend.

In the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series you dive and dive off bridges, rocks or platforms, into rivers, lakes and seas. The competition, which has also had a women’s category since 2014 and which in 2022 had stops in Europe, the United States and Australia, requires athletes (whose platforms are 21 meters high) to make four jumps always from the same height. Five judges, usually seated in a boat, there they evaluate with marks from 1 to 10 based on the jump, the positions held in the air and the entry into the water.

For the 2022 World Series, athletes have dived, for example, into the Seine with the Eiffel Tower in the background, into the waters in front of the Royal Danish Opera House in Copenhagen, from the Old Bridge in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina, into the Swiss Lake of Four Cantoni and from the cliffs of Polignano a Mare.

It takes divers about three seconds to cover the almost thirty meters that separate them from the water, in the meantime reaching a speed of over eighty kilometers per hour. The entry into the water is always with the feet, because doing it head first would be too dangerous: already like this, even in the case of near-perfect dives, the impact is very strong.

The admissible margin of error is almost absent: “If you make a mistake in a dive from 27 meters you will probably go to the hospital,” diver Andy Jones said in 2015.

Dives from great heights differ from those from the 10m platform in speed, in how external conditions can affect entry into the water and, more simply, because it is difficult to train for it. As recalled the Guardianin 2009 there was no suitable structure to do it and today there are three: one in China, one in the United States and one in Austria, in the Area 47 outdoor amusement park. Generally, to prepare for a 27-meter dive, it is broken down into three stages, putting each into a single 10m dive, and then slotting the three different stages into competition dives.

As well as all of his opponents, Hunt – who he said to have «a certain fear of heights when there is no water below» – in short, he found himself doing something almost new. In 2009 he finished second just behind the Colombian Orlando Duque, ten years his senior, but already in 2010 he won the first of his ten World Series. He soon realized that he had an exceptional talent, a proprioception out of the ordinary and a natural propensity to think and carry out more ambitious dives than others. Before him, diving from great heights tended to repeat what was done from 10 metres, and then dedicate oneself to preparing to enter the water; he went further, reworked, added, experimented with new things.

In 2019 in Lebanon it also came to what Red Bull defines «the Holy Grail of cliff diving»: the perfect dive, rated with a 10 by each of the five judges present.

For over ten years Hunt has lived in Paris with his partner, the French actress Sabine Ravinet, and for this reason he has had French nationality since 2020. In his spare time, in addition to training constantly, he likes to take care of the garden and play the piano. Until 2013 he alternated his work in show business with diving, for a few years now he has been a full-time diver: at the moment the World Series prizes are 7,000 euros for those who win a stage and 16,000 for those who win the competition. With this money and a sponsor, to which must be added the fact that the travel and accommodation expenses for each event are covered by Red Bull, Hunt can in short live by diving, even if he is not sailing for gold.

“He could certainly earn more from sponsors,” wrote the Guardian, but she finds it too stressful and therefore the only sponsorship deal she has, worth a few thousand euros a year, is with an Australian swimwear brand.

In addition to the competitions organized by Red Bull, Hunt also participates in the World Aquatics Championships, where from 2013 to 2019 medals were awarded for the men’s 27m and women’s 20m diving. in 2015 and 2019.

At the Olympics, on the other hand, there has never been diving from great heights and it is not at the expected moment that they will arrive. This is why, as a French athlete, a couple of years ago Hunt decided, despite his age, to fish out the old dream of a teenage athlete to aim for the 2024 Paris Olympics. While he wins in diving from almost thirty meters, the thirty-eight Hunt is therefore also training for dives from 10 metres, with a head entry, for a competition in which the current reigning Olympic champion, the Chinese Cao Yuan, is ten years younger than him.