‘Don’t jump!’ How this champion Aussie cliff diver quells her inner voice

This story is part of the October 1 edition of Good WeekendSee all 13 stories.

It’s a mid-June afternoon in Paris, and the city is woozy with summer heat. From a blank sky, the sun hits the boulevards like a hammer, pushing the thermometer close to 40 degrees. Yet the heatwave hasn’t deterred a noisy crowd of 20,000, who jam the banks and bridges of the Seine in the 16th arrondissement, where flashing signs implore them to “s’hydrater réguilèrement”.

Craning sunburnt necks, they stare high above the river, where a blonde woman in a blue swimsuit steps onto a platform for the second round of the 2022 Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series. Rhiannan Iffland is the reigning champion, but today finds herself in an uncustomary position. After failing to clinch the opener in Boston, the Australian is trailing in second place. She must pull off a big dive to win.

Much like knife-throwing or Russian roulette, the world’s oldest extreme sport makes for inherently dramatic viewing. Over a succession of up to four dives, female cliff divers must propel themselves from a 21-metre height – the men from six metres higher – and are given a score that’s multiplied by the degree of difficulty of their dive. After plummeting at speeds of more than 85 kilometres per hour, if a diver’s body position isn’t perfectly aligned, the water surface becomes like concrete. Any deviation can result in a fractured skull, broken limbs or worse.

Yet walking onto the platform opposite the Eiffel Tower, Iffland beams at the spectators and waves. The crowd turns silent as she positions herself backwards with arms wide, manoeuvring her feet until just the tips of her toes balance on the platform, her heels facing the murky water far below. For a moment, she stands there, utterly still.

Iffland en route to victory in Paris in June. Credit: Romina Amato/Red Bull Content Pool

Suddenly, her arms thrust to her sides, her legs bend, and she explodes into a backflip, jackknifing into a rapid blur of three somersaults and two twists before arrowing feet-first into the water. It’s a heady display of athletic power and balletic poise compressed into three seconds flat. She surfaces from the river’s cool depths with a huge grin. Iffland has prevailed once more.

For that is simply what the 31-year-old does, over and over again. Since winning her first cliff diving event as a wildcard entry in 2016, the young woman, who grew up in NSW’s Lake Macquarie region, has ruled the sport and should clinch her sixth straight title at the world series final in Sydney on October 15.

Pedants might point out the divers don’t always launch themselves off actual “cliffs” and, yes, there are a fair number of bridges, building ledges and platforms on the globetrotting tour. But whether it’s plunging into choppy seas off the Irish coast, night diving into the Dubai Marina, or spiralling from Sandanbeki Cliff in Japan, Iffland just keeps on winning.

“It’s very rare that you see an athlete of that calibre,” says Joey Zuber, a retired Brisbane cliff diver who now works as Red Bull’s live TV commentator for the sport. “You’d liken Rhiannan to Roger Federer in terms of her natural talent. She keeps raising the bar with her skill, style and sheer execution. Her consistency is almost ridiculous.”

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Trying to appreciate what Iffland is up against, I take a platform walk of my own ahead of today’s event. In Paris, the divers compete from a tower of scaffolding covered in vinyl sheeting with an internal staircase leading up the middle. Twenty-seven metres may not sound too intimidating, but it’s still equivalent to an eight-storey building. As I edge out onto the platform jutting over the Seine, I’m soon giddy with fear. Exposed on all sides, the platform is six metres long and barely two metres wide. It wobbles very slightly in the wind. Despite wearing a safety harness, I can only inch along in faltering half-steps, unable to look beyond my feet.

My progress becomes so wretched that Jonathan Paredes, a Mexican cliff diver who’s also standing at the top, walks out and tells me to grip his arm. “Just enjoy the view,” he says, as we look at the city in the shimmering heat. “Not many people get to see Paris like this.”

The following day, I meet Iffland at a cafe in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, and we sit on wicker chairs under a formerly pink-and-white parasol turned grey by the fumes of the traffic. The world champion now lives in Innsbruck, Austria, to access better facilities for her six-days-a-week training schedule, but she still looks as if she’s ambled straight off an Australian beach. Slim but athletic, Iffland has wheat-blonde hair, golden skin and Hollywood-white teeth that are on constant display, mainly because she smiles all the time.

Yet behind the grin, Iffland is struggling right now. “It doesn’t matter how many times you dive, you wake up the next day and always find bruises and muscle strains just from taking that impact time and time again,” she says. Cliff divers always hit the water feet first, because anything else would be literally suicidal. In training, the dives are never practised in their entirety because the repeated battering would be too much to withstand. Instead, each dive is broken into sections that are individually rehearsed at lower heights and brought together only in competition.

But even such lesser heights can take their toll. A former German professional footballer, Thorsten Legat, recently made headlines after one of his testicles had to be surgically removed after it was ruptured in a diving accident. Legat injured himself jumping from a three-metre-high board. Iffland dives from 18 metres higher.

Luckily, Iffland became familiar with the laws of gravity at an early age, thanks to her upbringing in Nords Wharf on the shore of Lake Macquarie. She grew up the youngest of three children with a father, Peter, a cabinetmaker and a mother, Sharon, who worked in retail. Much of Iffland’s early childhood was spent bouncing on her backyard trampoline. Her grandfather lived next door, and she recalls him drinking a cup of tea on his patio while watching her romp and giving her scores at the end of her routine.

With the lake on her doorstop and the white-sand beach at Catherine Hill five kilometres away, Iffland was constantly in the water and able to surf confidently by the age of 10. “It was a very, very outdoorsy childhood,” she says. “I remember some days, Dad being like: ‘What are you sitting inside doing your homework for? Go outside and play!’ ”

A young Iffland developing her skills at a school trampolining club. Credit: Courtesy of Rhiannan Iffland

After joining the trampoline club at school, Iffland had won a few state medals by her early teens. The club was closely aligned with a similar group for diving that quickly lured her in. Here, she came under the watch of Eric Brooker, a vastly experienced coach who supervised the diving judges at this year’s Commonwealth Games. He noticed her determination early on.

Brooker recalls training her as a 12-year-old before a state competition in Newcastle when she cracked her head open on the diving board. “I thought, ‘This is the last time I’m going to see this kid,’ ” he says. But at the next training session, Iffland was the first to turn up and pleaded to attempt the same dive again. “We called her ‘coin slot’ after that, because of the scar on her forehead,” says Brooker, who still trains Iffland when she’s in Australia.

At age 15, Iffland was offered a diving scholarship with the NSW Institute of Sport and moved to Sydney, accompanied initially by her father. For the next three years, she practically lived at its aquatic centre, putting in 11 training sessions every week. Diving off the 10-metre board, she competed at two Youth Olympic Festivals, but grew disillusioned over time when her dedication failed to yield real success. After a disappointing showing at the Open Nationals in Brisbane, Iffland opted to hang up her togs and return home. “I just felt burnt out with all the training and the sacrifices, and having to live away from my family,” she says.

What coaxed Iffland back to the diving board was a bizarre proposition. Out of the blue, she received an unsolicited email offering her a contract as an “aquatic acrobat” on a Royal Caribbean cruise ship. Now 20, she was planning to join the police force, but her father persuaded her to give the opportunity a go. “And it reignited my passion for the sport.”

High divers on cruise ships work as part of a team of performers. Climbing a ladder that sways with every roll of the ocean, they dive from a 17-metre platform into a tiny pool on the edge of the vast boat. “You can stand on the edge of the platform, push your toes over the edge and cover the [view of the] whole pool with your feet,” Iffland says. The ship’s lack of stability added a further element of risk as the see-sawing motion of the sea would send water slopping out of the pool, suddenly changing its depth. But Iffland loved it. She signed up for a nine-month contract sailing from Fort Lauderdale to the Bahamas, immediately following up with three cruises through the Mediterranean and Caribbean.

Working as a cruise ship “aquatic acrobat” in her 20s.Credit: Courtesy of Rhiannan Iffland

Her cruise-ship life acted as a form of high-divers’ university, as she learnt new skills in a highly social environment with young acrobats and dancers from around the world. “Some of my best friends are from those days,” she admits. Among her fellow cast members were a couple of cliff divers who, impressed by her technique, urged her to give their sport a go. “I was 21 and still felt invincible,” Iffland says. “That was the first time that I thought realistically, ‘Yeah, maybe I could do that.’ ”

Back in Australia, she decided to try competitive high-diving (world championship heights are 20 metres for women and 27 metres for men). It would prove a short-lived experiment. “The fear, the nerves, the adrenalin – they all just consumed me,” Iffland says of her debut at the 2016 FINA World Cup in Abu Dhabi. Misjudging her entry, she smacked the water to land almost flat, winding herself badly and finishing last. “I left there saying, ‘I’m done, I’m not cut out to compete.’ ”

Yet despite her unpromising display, Hassan Mouti, Red Bull’s cliff diving competition director, had been in the crowd and spotted flickers of potential. When a gap opened up on the 2016 Cliff Diving Series tour, she landed a wildcard entry.

“I was 21 and still felt invincible. That was the first time that I thought realistically, ‘Yeah, maybe I could do that.’ ”

Following her Abu Dhabi experience, Iffland was hesitant, but was swayed by the tales of her cliff-diving mates from the cruise ships. The first event of the tour was near Fort Worth, Texas. But as her father wove through traffic to Sydney airport so she could catch her Dallas flight, she began having tearful second thoughts. “I said to my dad in the car, ‘I don’t know if I want to go!’ And Dad turned to me and said, ‘Well, you can’t do any worse than last time. So go there and enjoy it, because otherwise there’s no point.’ ”

Hardly the most Churchillian pep talk – yet Iffland credits it with having a profound effect. A big reason for her failure in Abu Dhabi was allowing herself to become overwhelmed by the occasion and fear. “I genuinely think that my dad’s words were the ones that changed my career,” she says. “I adopted this new sunny disposition going to that competition: ‘Turn up. Enjoy the moment. Do what you’ve got to do. If it doesn’t work, that’s fine.’ And then I realised that new attitude really worked.”

The effect was, indeed, transformative. During her first year as a cliff diver, Iffland reached the podium at all seven events, winning five to seal a shock victory. She has defended her title ever since, while also winning high-diving gold for Australia at the World Aquatics Championships in 2017 and 2019. A childhood grounding in both trampolining and diving may have laid the technical foundation for this success. But Iffland is not alone in believing that it’s her mentality that’s turned her into a champion.

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At a boat party on the Seine, I find myself surrounded by a variety of cliff divers – an international crowd of petite, suntanned women and well-built young men. They’re present because the event has been organised by Mido, the Swiss watch brand that’s one of the sport’s major sponsors. In the dwindling light, as the boat chugs past Notre-Dame, I get talking to Jonathan Paredes, who rescued me on the dive platform earlier that day. The 2017 world champion is a short, clean-cut figure in his early 30s, who bears the sort of quiet intensity that risking your life on a regular basis presumably fosters. Asked to explain Iffland’s dominance, he immediately points to her laid-back demeanour and ability to stay calm under pressure.

“Rhiannan manages to be chill the whole time,” Paredes says. “It’s almost like she doesn’t care a lot. And I think sometimes that energy gives her that extra confidence to be, like, ‘What could ever go wrong?’ ”

An injury in Bosnia in 2017 put Iffland’s tilt at the world-champion title in jeopardy.Credit: Romina Amato/Red Bull Content Pool

Such composure is valuable because, of course, a lot can go wrong. Small things become big things fast when you’re somersaulting towards the water at breakneck speed. In 2017, Iffland was competing in the Bosnian city of Mostar in the penultimate event of the year. She was diving off Stari Most Bridge, which arcs steeply between medieval towers over the Neretva River. Flipping off the bridge, in mid-air, Iffland suddenly felt she was rotating too quickly, her body rolling forward as the water loomed up. Focused on correcting her position, she neglected to brace her lower body as she sliced into the icy water. Smashed by the impact, Iffland had to be rescued from the river by the safety team. Her groin muscles were badly torn, and she sustained MCL strains to both knees. Standard recovery from such injuries would take about eight weeks. But the final event was in five, and she needed a podium finish to win her second title.

Unable to dive, Iffland was forced to concentrate on rehab. Nevertheless, she decided to participate in the last round – at a wild destination at Chile’s Lago Ranco, at the foothills of the Andes, where the platform was embedded in deep forest by a huge waterfall. Unwilling to chance a practice dive for fear of aggravating her injuries, she just sat on the platform in the hours before the event, her legs dangling over the drop. Feeling the spray of the crashing water and listening to its roar, she visualised her dives and prayed that her heavily strapped body would hold out.

Iffland didn’t merely survive: she won. “I was petrified in Chile,” she admits. “And that’s still one of the highlights of my career because I proved to myself how resilient I really am.”

A career-highlight win came in 2017 at Chile’s Lago Ranco, where Iffland took out the top title despite having suffered a diving injury five weeks earlier. Credit: Samo Vidic/Red Bull Content Pool

Today, the r-word has become tiresomely overused. Yet one common quality that unites so many top cliff divers is this ability to bounce back. Paredes, for example, was hospitalised in the 2021 series after landing on his back, but in Paris this year he found the courage to dive once more. In 2008, on a dive in Colombia and nine hours from the nearest hospital, Joey Zuber snapped his femur before surgical complications led to renal failure that almost killed him. Four years later, he returned to dive off the same bridge. Indeed, the heroic comeback often feels like the dominant narrative in cliff diving. You repeatedly hear these tales of redemption that play out on the dive platform in the most visceral way.

This is partly why Dr Eric Brymer is convinced the mental strength of extreme sports athletes is woefully underappreciated. A senior lecturer in psychology at Southern Cross University, Brymer believes that there is a range of psychological benefits to be gleaned from such sports, which he defines as “activities where a mismanaged mistake or accident would most likely result in death”.

“Fear is absolutely an essential element of what it means to be human. But we have labelled it and categorised it as bad.”

Rather than become unglued by fear – as I became on my platform walk – the athletes learn to manage this primal emotion, actively using it to sharpen their senses to perform. “Fear is absolutely an essential element of what it means to be human,” Brymer tells me. “But we have labelled it and categorised it as bad.” Such avoidance not only leaves us stressed and mentally weaker, he continues, it can also deprive us of a wealth of experiences. As a female BASE jumper once put it to Brymer, her sport is the “ultimate metaphor for jumping into life rather than standing on the edge, quivering”.

Iffland with fellow cliff diver Jonathan Paredes. He credits her success to staying calm under pressure.Credit: Dean Treml/Red Bull Content Pool

The fear never goes, Iffland admits. Before every dive there’s always a moment when her mind is ambushed by an upsurge of panic and she’d prefer to be anywhere else. I’m surprised by this confession given her mastery of her sport. Two months have passed since the Paris event and Iffland is talking to me via Zoom from her Innsbruck kitchen, having followed up that victory with straight wins in Copenhagen and Oslo. Yet no amount of success can spare her that moment of gut-twisting dread. “There’s always that voice in my head saying, Don’t jump!”

But when that moment comes, Iffland has learnt what to do. She starts by jumping up and down to shake off some nervous energy. Next, she runs through the dive in her head step by step, while breathing as deeply as possible. Having reconnected mentally and physically, she allows herself a minute of respite and closes her eyes to imagine the beach at Catherine Hill, picturing her niece and nephews running along the golden sand.

“Then, when I open my eyes, all my thinking is done, and it’s only about positive reinforcement,” Iffland says. “When I walk out onto the platform, I’m just trying to be calm and thinking: ‘Okay, I got this. This is my moment.’ ”

These mental acrobatics are every bit as complex as the pikes and twists that she performs in mid-air. Iffland may train six days a week to condition her body to withstand her dives, but the psychological load is equally taxing. Sometimes, she wakes up suddenly from dreams of being mid-somersault. During competition season, when she’s trying to unwind, an unwelcome “voice” in her head needles her about the next death-defying encounter. “I’m learning to be the dictator of it,” she says, a little unconvincingly.

“You hear this thud, and then it goes silent. It’s such an amazing feeling because there’s the relief you survived.”

Why, then, does she keep putting herself through such trials? Iffland has nothing left, after all, to prove in the sport, and the prize money for cliff diving reflects its niche status – the overall winner of both the men’s and women’s competition takes home just €16,000 ($23,600). Iffland says she’s “living comfortably”, primarily due to income from her main sponsors, Red Bull and Australian swimwear company Budgy Smuggler.

But the main reason she has no plans to retire or settle down (she’s single) is that she enjoys the travel and the exotic locations that make every competition so different. Most of all, she loves that sensation of flight and the moment right after striking the water. “You hear this thud, and then it goes silent,” she says. “It’s such an amazing feeling because there’s the relief you survived – plus, obviously, you’re so full of adrenalin. It just feels amazing.”

Four days later, I tune into an online feed to watch Iffland compete in her next event. She’s back in Mostar on Stari Most Bridge, the scene of her worst accident. But as she steps onto the platform – before nailing another winning dive – she stops to revel in the energy of the crowd. She begins dancing and clapping to the music. She cups a hand to her ear, imploring the throng to make more noise, punching the air with delight at their response. Only two minutes earlier, Iffland would have been attacked by her usual fears and found herself battling to contain them. And those fears are still right there, too. She just won’t let them hold her back.

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