From TV talent shows to 10m platforms, Rousseau is going for Olympic gold (well, sort of)

A decade before Cassiel Rousseau became a diving world champion, he was a tiny boy in tights moonlighting as a human slingshot. The 11-year-old Rousseau was the youngest member of Odyssey, an acrobatic troupe from Brisbane that made the 2012 grand final of Australia’s Got Talent. “It would still be on YouTube,” he says.

It is indeed still on YouTube. The footage shows him and sister Elodie, then 14, being catapulted from one side of the stage to the other in front of judges Dannii Minogue, Kyle Sandilands and Brian McFadden. Somersaulting as they went, Rousseau every bit a mini-Peter Pan. The 13-member group was an amalgamation of quads, trios and duos from Brisbane’s Robertson Gymnastic Academy, where a number of the sprawling Rousseau clan trained.

“I was in a men’s four, and we just came together and made a big performance with the coach,” says Rousseau. “I switched from gymnastics to acrobatics, and we pretty much got as far as we could because acrobatics is a pretty small sport in Australia. We went to the 2017 World Games in Poland, but by that point I was getting too heavy to be thrown around – and I didn’t want to be the thrower.”

Being afraid of heights, Rousseau didn’t want to be a diver, either. But diving does bring us to where this tattooed, mulleted young man is right now (about to contest the Paris Olympics) and why he is so well placed to bring home a gold medal (because he does not really care about gold medals).

Cassiel Rousseau is putting the finishing touches on his Paris Olympics preparations.Credit: Oscar Coleman

This last revelation is not evident as Rousseau trains at the Sydney Olympic Park Aquatic Centre, two days before Australia’s Olympic diving team leave for Europe. The afternoon’s repertoire from the 10-metre platform – front 4½ somersaults into 2½ twists and 2½ saults – is executed so exactly you just know that whatever tiny imperfections a poolside coach has pulled up on an iPad will mean two-fifths of f-all to a lay person.

It isn’t until after the session, when Rousseau is drying off and remembering his 2023 world championships win, that the seemingly incompatible start to coexist. How else to explain that this free-spirited 23-year-old talking me through his latest ink also produces such precision from the platform that he stopped China claiming a clean sweep of all 13 gold medals on offer in Fukuoka?

The answer comes in response to a leading question about taking confidence from pipping the all-powerful Chinese, and relates back to those Australia’s Got Talent days.

A young, airborne Cassiel Rousseau during his acrobatics days with Robertson Gymnastics Academy.Credit: Robertson Gymnastics Academy/Facebook

“I dunno,” he thinks, refastening silver chains around his neck and returning rings to his fingers (one is a signet of the Olympic rings). “To me, I don’t really care about winning, I just more care about enjoying what I’m doing. I enjoy competing, I enjoy training. I don’t really care if I come first or last.

“Same goes with the Olympics this year: I don’t really care where I come. I just like performing, which obviously came from the acrobatics and all that kind of jazz. That obviously helps the nerves – I don’t really get nervous – which then obviously helps performance.”

Rousseau practises off the 10-metre platform.Credit: Oscar Colman

As painful as such words might sound to the ears of every elite athlete who has invested in mindset work to rein in pre-competition nerves, they do not land as arrogant. In the same breath he says “I think I screamed underwater” after his victorious dive, “just knowing that I’m 99 per cent sure I just became the world champion”. It is more along the lines of: kid from Queensland enjoys performing and wants to get it right for audience.

That too is in itself interesting, given Rousseau is a self-professed introvert. “Very, very introverted,” he adds. “I’m a very shy person. I like thinking. I’ve always been a bit of a listener, which I guess makes me extremely coachable. I like thinking about what other people have to say, and not necessarily judging.”

Rousseau and his 10-metre synchro partner Domonic Bedggood train in Sydney.Credit: Oscar Colman

According to a Diving Australia official on site today, Rousseau is a quintessential onion in that he has layers, and they are still peeling off several years after he took up the sport. Almost every conversation reveals something new. It was only at the turn of the year, for example, that some of his colleagues learnt he is a twin. He is, in fact, one of seven kids – an eclectic, bilingual clan which also includes a set of triplets.

“Same mum and dad,” he says, unprompted. “All natural as well.” And all within a six-year age range. Filed into bunk beds in shared rooms at night and talking over each other during dinner. “Definitely different,” he continues. “Very chaotic. Lots of yelling. Lots of fighting. Parents split when I was about six or seven, so it was predominantly mum looking after all seven of us, which was very tough. Dad wasn’t fully out of the picture, he was still kind of there – I still have a great relationship with him. But it was mainly just mum.”

Each dive is followed by an iPad replay.Credit: Oscar Colman

Mum is Emmanuelle Rousseau, a Paris-born cellular biologist who lived for a time in South Africa before migrating to Australia and, with seven children on her hands, switched to teaching French at her children’s school. She is the daughter of the late Michel Rousseau, a track cyclist who won sprint gold for France at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics.

Dad is Mark Forwood, a weightlifter turned academic from Hobart who is now a professor of anatomy and head of the school of medical science at Griffith University. “Very, very smart man,” says Rousseau. “And he’s very relaxed. He’s a very calm person, which is where I think I get my calmness when I’m performing. And Mum’s a very hard worker, which is where I feel like I got my hardworking trait.”

The seven siblings are as follows. There’s 27-year-old Liam, who was in Rousseau’s acrobatics four and is now an occupational therapist. Then come the 26-year-old triplets Etienne (professional gamer living in Tokyo, very good at gymnastics); Elijah (chemical engineer and “the nerd of the family – extremely smart”) and Elodie (artist with Cirque Du Soleil who now “lives in a van in NSW and I think does some aged care work”); Rousseau and his twin, Clementine (paramedic, used to play youth NPL football and QWAFL); and 21-year-old Oceane (former acrobatic gymnast now studying occupational therapy).

Other recent layers include that Rousseau is studying psychology at Griffith University. Another is that he enjoys classical music, particularly the pianists, and name-drops Chopin as a favourite. That is the influence of his mum, and comes up as we are discussing the tattoo down his right triceps depicting a skeleton playing a violin. Said skeleton is playing one of his favourite songs, Binks’ Sake, an old pirate anthem featured in anime One Piece.

Rousseau’s right side - the travel diary.Credit: Emma Kemp

There’s a lot of anime on Rousseau’s skin, along with a rice bowl, butterfly and snake, and a sizeable hannya demon mask on his thigh. Each tattoo on his right arm and leg represents an overseas trip – a visual travel diary of sorts. Some he got to match with other divers; one matches with his twin sister, Clementine.

“The left side of my body is more for the important ones, the ones that actually have meaning,” he says. He points to a “333″ on his left ankle. “This one was matching with two other divers. We were going to put “menage a trois”, but that means threesome. Then we thought about “throuple”, but sometimes the diving cameras zoom up on your feet.

Another reads “c’est pas grave”. “It’s not that serious. It’s from my nan. She used to say it when we were kids and we would come up crying.” The Olympic rings adorn the inside of his left forearm, and inside his left wrist is “1956” on top of “2020″, the year his grandfather became an Olympian and the date he became an Olympian. Rousseau loves the connection, even though he met his grandfather only a handful of times, though “Mum was on the phone to him every single night”.

Cassiel Rousseau’s grandfather, French cyclist Michel Rousseau, won gold at the 1956 Olympics.Credit: Getty Images

Then there are the things we know. Like the fact Rousseau started diving in 2017 when his mum dragged him along to a trial for Oceane. “I obviously have a big fear of heights and just did not want to go,” he says. “But she got me up at 4.30am and I was just kicking and screaming and crying, and being a little rat in the car.”

The trial was an introduction to the one-metre and three-metre springboards. Rousseau used the five minutes of free time at the end to conduct some unofficial exposure therapy. “I went up to the five-metre and jumped off, then I went up to the seven-metre and jumped off. Then I went up to the 10-metre and was like, ‘No way in hell am I jumping off this’, and just walked back down.”

It took him two months of trying to muster up the courage for a pin drop off the platform. To dive from a height that can strip you of your sanity was another matter entirely, and involved extensive preparation on dry land such as flipping on belts, and somersaulting off trampolines and springboards onto mats or pits.

“The more you do it, the more you get used to it and the more confident you get,” he says. “Now I’m just very confident in my ability to do my dive, so the fear has gone away. If I was asked to do a new dive, that fear would come back.”

It wasn’t long before Rousseau was climbing to the very top of the tower up to 90 times every training session. A year after that initial trial he was Australian elite junior champion, and at the delayed Tokyo 2020 Olympics he reached the 10-metre platform final. His 2023 world championships exploits earned him World Aquatics’ diver of the year award.

Rousseau did not defend his individual 10-metre platform title at April’s 2024 world championships in Doha, opting instead to focus on the 10-metre synchronised event alongside Domonic Bedggood. The duo will contest that category in Paris, and Rousseau the individual. I wish him luck, even though he does not care how he goes. “I do care,” he says. “I don’t and I do – you know what I mean?”

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