Falling with style
Gary Hunt rules the daredevil sport of cliff diving with a carefree ease that conceals the turmoil of his journey,
IN EARLY MAY 2009, 12 men arrived in La Rochelle on the west coast of France, carrying a few pairs of Speedos in their luggage. They had not come to swim but, as they liked to put it, to “fly.” Their sport, which involves diving from cliffs, buildings, or bridges, always comes with an atmosphere of nervous excitement, but this time the stakes were higher than ever before. Cliff diving had long been at the obscure end of extreme sports, a pursuit for thrill-seekers with day jobs. Now the energy drink company Red Bull was launching what it called a “cliff-diving world series.”
In traditional pool diving, the highest event is the 10-meter (33-foot) platform, and even Olympic divers can find the height unsettling. In La Rochelle, the organizers had affixed a short platform to the ramparts of the medieval Saint Nicolas Tower, 26 meters above the frigid sea—as high as an eight-story building. In their three seconds of flight, the divers would reach speeds of more than 50 mph. As they fell, they would do as many twists and somersaults as they dared in order to impress the judges before hitting the sea. Make a mistake and it was like you’d “run full speed into a wall,” as the Colombian Orlando Duque, or “The Duke,” the favorite to win the new series, explained at the time.
A novice from England, Gary Hunt, was 24, skinny and pale. He was still so inexperienced from such heights that he wore two pairs of Speedos for extra protection. Hunt went on to take third place, and as the 2009 season progressed, it became clear that he was a natural. Like all the best divers, he had an acute sense of aerial awareness, always knowing where he was in the air, even as he spun and somersaulted.
One of the major challenges of cliff diving as a competitive sport is that it is very difficult to practice in advance from the full height. At the time of Hunt’s first season, there were no training facilities with platforms high enough. (Today, there are just three, in Austria, the U.S., and China.) For that reason, high divers had only ever performed routines that could also be done from a 10-meter platform in the pool. Hunt wanted to try something more ambitious, an unprecedented dive that made the most of the elevation from which he would be falling. He would have to practice his new dive in pieces, and then, on the day of competition, put it all together for the first time.
At the fourth event of the tour, in Antalya, Turkey, Hunt felt ready to try. Before the start, when the athletes informed the judges what dives they would perform, Hunt described a routine that had never been attempted before in any sort of diving: a triple somersault, with four twists—the triple quad. It would be, as Duque put it, “the most difficult dive ever done.”
Hunt didn’t win with his triple quad in Turkey, but he did in the next competition. At the last stop of the season, he introduced another new dive, and won again. Overall that season, he finished tied on points with The Duke, who was crowned champion, having won more of the individual competitions. Hunt was content. He hadn’t set out to win the series, he told an interviewer during the season, but to explore his potential.
Since that inaugural season in 2009, when he finished second, Hunt has been on a run of dominance that would be extraordinary in any sport, winning 42 of 82 Red Bull cliffdiving events, and nine of 11 world series titles. The other two times he was runner-up. He is, unquestionably, the greatest cliff diver of all time, “the Michael Jordan, the Muhammad Ali, the Tiger Woods” of the sport, as Steven LoBue, an American diver who had the misfortune of competing against Hunt for many years, put it in 2021.
But Hunt remains strikingly uninterested in the financial opportunities or professional trappings that typically come with such sporting success. He doesn’t have a coach, an agent, or any interest in feeding the social media machine. He gives his winner’s trophies to his mother or puts on his carpentry belt and turns them into something useful, like an ashtray or plant holder. (“Trophies disguised as objects,” he calls them.) Hunt is now 38 but has retained, as L’Équipe newspaper put it, the look of an “eternal teen.”
LIKE MANY TALES of human flight, this one started with an envious glance upward. Hunt was 9 and in a pool in Leeds, in the north of England. As he’d done with ballet and tap and modern dancing, he’d followed his two older sisters into competitive swimming. But Hunt was not a strong swimmer, and was bored doing lengths. Out of the corner of his eye he saw some other children jumping off a platform into the water, chatting and laughing as they waited to dive again. That looked more fun.
Hunt begged his parents to let him try. He quickly progressed from the 1-meter to the 3-meter and 10-meter platforms, and within a couple of years he was traveling the country for competitions. When Hunt was 16, his parents separated, and his mother moved to Southampton. A few years later, Hunt was joined there by his best friend, Gavin Brown. Though Hunt was a very good diver, Brown was better, winning a bronze medal at the junior world championships. Popular and outgoing, he lived by
his motto, “go hard or go hard home.”
In 2006, Hunt qualified for the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne in the synchronized 10-meter platform event, diving with Callum Johnstone. Though Hunt was still only 21, he could see that younger, more talented divers were coming through.
If Hunt wanted to be the best at something, there was only one way to go. Up.
Hunt’s first trip into high altitude came later that year, when he was still at university. Back then, and to a lesser extent today, the amusement park circuit was a common source of employment for cliff divers. Hunt’s diving coach in Southampton had been asked if he knew anyone who could fill in for a pirate show in Lido di Jesolo, a resort town near Venice, Italy. He recommended Hunt, who readily accepted.
Besides performing in sword fights, Hunt’s role was to leap into a tiny pool from 18 meters. This was the first time he’d be diving from above 10 meters. The ladder was narrow, and the platform barely had space for his feet. Hunt feared that he might miss the pool. But he quickly got the hang of it, and then started trying more complicated dives.
Hunt’s friend Gavin Brown also tried high diving that summer, at a different amusement park. When the pair returned to the house they shared in Southampton, they watched videos of cliff-diving competitions and talked about how they might push the boundaries of the sport one day.
Brown, more extroverted than Hunt, would sometimes go out partying by himself and then phone his friend to ask for a lift home. In the early hours of April 28, 2007, on a night out, Brown rang but Hunt missed his call. Later that morning, Hunt’s phone rang again, and when he answered he learned that Brown had been knocked over in a hitand-run accident. He died later that day.
In the months that followed, Hunt lost control. “I was just in disbelief that Gavin had died,” he told me. “I started to imagine that he was not dead and that I had to accomplish some mission to be reunited with him.” A voice in his head told him to walk from Southampton to Bath, 50 miles away. He got lost and at nightfall he sheltered in a barn, where he was found by the police, who’d been alerted by reports of a man on the highway.
When Hunt made his debut in 2009, his mental state had improved, though his grief was still raw. Between competitions, that first year, Hunt worked at the Walygator amusement park near Metz, in the north of France. His role in the show was playing a high-diving character who believed he was Tarzan. “Jane” was played by a French actor named Sabine Ravinet, who also ran theater workshops in prisons and for children from troubled homes. She was more than two decades older than Hunt.
She spoke little English—and he little French—but with miming and patience they got to know each other. “My first impression was that he was not like the others,” Ravinet recalled recently. “In his way of listening to you, of being completely present with you, his gentleness, and also a certain mystery in his personality.”
They moved in together in Paris in 2010, while continuing to work at Walygator each summer for three more years, even as Hunt flew to distant locations—from Easter Island to Mexico—on the cliff-diving tour. He grew to love the amusement park life. Besides divers, there were clowns, dancers, and puppeteers from across the world. Hunt was also healing.
IN SEPTEMBER LAST year, I traveled to Polignano a Mare, a seaside town on Italy’s heel, to watch Hunt compete in the penultimate event of the 2022 cliffdiving world series. On Friday morning, the day the competition began, I went to meet Hunt for breakfast at his hotel. When I arrived, he was midway through a plate of eggs, bacon, and tomato, which he’d wash down with two coffees, a croissant, and a bowl of granola. “I don’t have to be fussy with what I eat,” he said, laughing. “I only have 27 seconds of work this weekend.”
At Polignano, to reach the diving platform, competitors had to walk from their hotels through the old town, get the nod of approval from a security guard, and enter a cliffside apartment. On the apartment’s balcony, two platforms extended out over the sparkling waters The lower platform, 21 meters above the sea, was for the women, who joined the tour in 2014. The men’s platform, reached by a ladder, was 6 meters higher. Twenty-seven meters is the maximum height for men’s competitive diving: Above that, rapid acceleration makes it almost impossible to perform additional somersaults while greatly increasing the injury risk.
On the platform, Hunt was casual, not even bothering to bring flip-flops, since he planned to take a shortcut back up. He sat down on the edge, swinging his dangling ankles for a while, before standing up and jumping into the void. On surfacing, he waved away the Jet Ski that takes the divers back to shore and swam to the cliff. After several failed attempts, he managed to leap up with one hand to grab hold of a small ledge and proceeded to scale the cliff, like a climber, reaching the platform five minutes before the start of the competition. I asked one of the staff if this was normal behavior. “For Gary it’s normal,” he replied.
Hunt ended up winning at Polignano, and, four weeks later, he managed to arrive on time at Sydney Harbor for the last event of the Red Bull series. He needed another victory if he was to be sure of his fourth series win in a row, and his 10th overall, a feat that may never be repeated. It came down to the final dive. Emerging from the water with a huge grin, Hunt hopped over a security barrier and hugged Ravinet. When I texted to congratulate him, he seemed more excited by the prospect of his upcoming week’s holiday in Australia than by his latest title.
“Whoo-hoo,” he wrote, “je suis en vacances!!!”