Cheetah and Rhiann’s acrobatic Bondi wedding

Cheetah and Rhiann tied the knot on Bondi Beach in April — and this is how they celebrated.

TWAM 17 Oct 2015

How’s this for a wedding day snap? Californians Cheetah Platt and Rhiann Woodyard tied the knot on Bondi Beach in April — and this is how they celebrated. Don’t be alarmed, they’re professional acrobats. For this surreal-looking photo, Rhiann first performed a handstand on Cheetah’s upstretched palms, then he launched her into the air, and they snapped into this nonchalant pose for an instant before gravity brought her spearing back downwards, head first, totalling entrusting herself to his safe hands. (It’s a move that requires him to catch her by the thighs, stopping her “with her head inches above the ground”, he says.) Brings a whole new meaning to Here Comes the Bride, doesn’t it?

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Cheetah and Rhiann had been married before. About 30 times, in fact. They’d originally planned a regular wedding, but recoiled at the stress and expense of it all, and struck upon the idea of a fantastic elopement over three months and six continents, in which they would get married in each and every place they felt like it. They ended up tying the knot in such exotic locations as a Masai village in Kenya, the Pyramids in Egypt, a druidical stone circle in Ireland, and the jungle in Colombia. Well, why not? Most brides wear their dress only once. “Mine’s not even white any more,” laughs Rhiann, 33.

The couple, pictured in a shot from the Moran Contemporary Photographic Prize, are now back in the US, and are still getting married as and when the mood takes them (current count: 52).

Cheetah — that’s his real name, by the way — met Rhiann in 2013 at an acrobatics training session, when she happened to be wearing cheetah-print leggings. “Nice pants,” were his first words to her. And it was love at first lift. Or as Cheetah, 31, puts it, “I picked her up, and never put her down.”