Cliff Diving
Rhiannan Iffland: Get to know the Eight Time World Champion Cliff Diver!
A rush of emotions. Fear. Adrenaline. It's all part of the job when it comes to being the best in the world at Cliff Diving.
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Cliff diver Rhiannan (Rhi) Iffland can tell you a lot about what it feels like to stand on the edge of the platform, ready to launch her body 21 metres into the water below. Just don’t ask her to describe what goes through her mind while she’s actually in the air.
“It goes really fast,” she says. “And sometimes it's not till I actually hit the water that I realise what I've thought about in the dive.”
Sometimes she’s counting in her head or running through visual cues, like when she does her inward triple half. And then - silence.
“When you hit the water, it’s complete silence. It’s such a rush and so many small thoughts happening so quickly, and then all of a sudden you go, ‘OK, that feels amazing.’ That’s why I continue to go back up and do it again, because it just feels amazing, the rush when you go through the water.”
Rhi is currently gearing up for her next rush, the final event of the 2024 World Series in her hometown of Sydney on 10 November. She’s fresh from a win at the penultimate event of the series in Antalya, Turkiye, which secured her eighth consecutive title in the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series.
Rhi has been slicing through the water and the records since she made her debut on the Red Bull circuit in 2016, but what does it take to make it in this high-octane sport?
Rhiannan Iffland of Australia dives from the 21 metre platform in Turkiye
© Romina Amato
Diving into action
The Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series began in 2009, with the women’s competition added five years later. Twelve male and 12 female divers travel the world to compete in eight different events throughout the season, with a points system used to rank competitors.
The winners of the men’s and women’s competitions take home the King Kahekili trophy, named for the Hawaiian chief who is credited with starting the sport when he leapt from the cliffs of Kaunolo on the island of Lānaʻi way back in the 1700s.
In the women’s competition, the King Kahekili trophy has had a permanent home in Rhi Iffland’s pool room since 2016, when she won the World Series in her debut year. She’s taken it out every year since, with the exception of 2020 - and that’s only because the series was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Now 33, Rhi has been diving since she was nine years old. She had been doing trampoline gymnastics when friends encouraged her to give the diving pool a go. Rhi made her way through state, national and international competitions during her teen years, competing in both the three-metre and 10-metre platforms, but by the age of 18 she was feeling burnt out and ready for a new challenge after years of diving in the pool every day.
Little did she know that the new challenge would come in the form of a cruise ship.
“I was actually offered a contract on cruise ships to be involved in the entertainment world of diving,” says Rhi. “At that point, I’d been following the Red Bull Diving World Series and always wanted to be a part of it - the exciting lifestyle, more of a challenge and a different avenue - because I was still passionate about what I was doing.”
Alongside her cruise colleagues, Rhi started training for high dive, making the transition from 10 to 20 metres (in the Red Bull World Series, women dive from a 21-metre platform and men from a 27-metre platform).
“It was quite a fun transition, doing it through the entertainment world! And before I knew it, I was standing up there and starting my [cliff diving] career in 2016.”
Training the body
Unfortunately for the rest of us, cliff diving isn’t the type of sport the average punter can take up in their free time, or join a social comp on a Sunday morning. It’s a highly technical pursuit that requires a unique combination of strength, flexibility and acrobatic skills.
Rhi says that a lot of cliff divers get their start in diving, gymnastics or even circus backgrounds. But no matter where they’ve come from, it takes a lot of work and persistence to get to the Red Bull platform.
“It’s not like we walk straight up to 21 metres and do the dive. It takes a lot of work to master the basics and then take it step by step to get there.”
To prepare for the World Series, Rhi’s training schedule varies throughout the year. Pre-season sees her in the pool five or six days a week at the New South Wales Institute of Sport, training with the diving team. In these sessions, she’s working on take-offs, twists, rotations - doing it over and over and over again until it becomes second nature. Add in three or four gym sessions, as well as some gymnastics-based training with trampoline somersaults.
While there are lots of similarities to Olympic diving, there are plenty of differences too. Given the extra height of the platform, cliff divers need to land feet first to absorb some of the impact, rather than head first. That means adding in a half twist or more of a rotation to ensure their feet hit the water first.
Then there’s the mental discipline required to launch yourself off cliffs on a regular basis.
“Mentally, it's a whole different ball game,” says Rhi. “There’s a lot more going through your mind when you're standing on 20 metres in comparison to 10 metres. So when I made the transition [to cliff diving], that was the hardest thing to adapt to at first, and to understand that it was a normal reaction that when you're standing there, you are going to go through the rush of emotions, adrenaline, fear, all of those sorts of things.”
And training the mind
The mind/body connection is an important one in cliff diving - not only during the adrenaline-fuelled events, but also to adapt back to life on dry land between competitions.
“I've been working with [Red Bull’s elite performance coach] Nam Baldwin this year to not only learn how to deal with the competition nerves but also working on, when an event finishes, trying to regulate how you're feeling mentally, and then get back straight back into a regular training schedule. The more you do the training physically and in the pool, the more confident you feel when you go into a competition. So body and mind really connect.”
And even though Rhi’s been cliff diving for eight years now, she says the rush of fear and adrenaline still feels the same as it did right back at the beginning - but she’s learnt how to manage it these days.
“When I started, I was always thinking, ‘Oh, this is going to go away once I get more experience under my belt.’ The thing is, it never changed. But what I've taught myself is to do the thinking process before actually stepping onto the end of the platform. Because if there's too much going on in your mind, then it's hard to focus on what you have to do technically, and to do it right. So when I am standing on the end of the board, it's just focusing on a couple of key things that I need to do depending on the dive.
“Obviously, there's always the inner voice that's telling you what could go wrong, or telling you that it's scary, or telling you that you should be nervous, but as long as you can control those things, it's kind of just focusing on what you need to do.”
Rhiannan Iffland of Australia acknowledges the crowd in Canada
© Romina Amato
Life on tour
The Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series sees the world’s best cliff divers make eight stops around the globe throughout the year, each more picturesque than the last. It’s hard for Rhi to pick just one, but she counts Takachiho Gorge in Japan and Sydney Harbour among her favourite spots to dive. And then there’s the historic town of Polignano a Mare on Italy’s southern coast.
“Diving off somebody’s balcony and then walking through the cobblestone streets of the small town in Polignano is amazing,” she says. “The World Series has been going there for a long time, so the fans always show up and the energy is always amazing. It’s such a beautiful place.”
That’s not to say that life on tour is all sea and sunshine, though. Rhi says that all dives are challenging in their own way, and still remembers the scariest dive of her career in Chile six years ago.
“I was going into the final and I was injured in the penultimate stop, but I still had a chance to take out the World Series title. Basically I didn’t do any training dives because I wasn’t sure how my injury was going to hold up, so I decided I’d go straight into the event. That first dive of the event, after not training for a month, was probably one of the scariest dives that I’ve done in my career. But in saying that, it also taught me a lot as well, to listen to my body and trust my mind that I knew what I was doing.”
22 min
One With the Water
Rhiannan Iffland dives into Kehu Butler’s coastal home in New Zealand, learning local traditions on the way.
Heading home to Sydney
It’s not every day that you get to round out the World Series and take home your eighth world title in front of a home crowd, but that’s exactly what Rhi will be doing in just a few short weeks in Sydney. How does she prepare for such a monumental moment?
“This summer, I was training in Madrid up until [the most recent World Series event in] Turkiye, and now I've arrived home and I'm going to get back in the pool at Olympic Park. I’m getting back to the gym, back to the pool. I’m just going to go hard for it, train the best I can and really try to enjoy the atmosphere and the energy that this event is going to bring.”
In Sydney, it won’t just be Rhi’s family and friends cheering in the stands - it will also be the next generation of female cliff divers, watching Rhi and the current crop of competitors do what they do best.
“The number of ladies coming through in the past two to three years has almost doubled, and the dives are getting more difficult,” says Rhi. “The energy is amazing, it’s a really cool thing to see. It’s such a cool feeling to know that I was one of the pioneers, and that my generation of divers inspired this younger generation to come in.”
So maybe there is a chance for the rest of us to try this action-packed sport after all?
“You know what? I think action sports are definitely the way of the future!”
Good news, you can watch fthe Red Bull Cliff Diving World Finals here in Sydney for free November 9th and 10th at Mrs Macquaries Point. All details here.
Love Cliff Diving? Watch as World champion cliff diver Rhiannan Iffland journeys to the Australian Outback to rediscover her sense of self and love for diving and in the process uncovers a whole lot more than she bargained for.
26 min
Rainbow Dive
Rhiannan Iffland journeys to the Australian Outback and uncovers more than she expected.
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