Cliff Diving
Get to know Molly Carlson's cliff diving coach Stéphane Lapointe
Get an inside look into what it takes to become a world-class cliff diver with insights from Red Bull athlete Molly Carlson's coach Stéphane Lapointe.
Cliff diving is one of the most thrilling, exhilarating, and challenging sports that demands a unique blend of courage, precision, and skill. The difficulty doesn’t just come from leaping off towering cliffs or platforms from heights of up to 26 metres, but also in executing a flawless technique and managing a free fall to enter the water at the optimal angle. Unpredictable elements, like wind, location, and water currents, take the intensity and complexity of the sport to whole new heights and require the athletes to adapt and adjust on the fly.
There’s rigorous training that cliff divers do to enhance their technical skills, conditioning, and mental focus to become successful because precision is paramount. In multiple ways, cliff divers like Canadian Molly Carlson have to demonstrate not only a relentless commitment to their craft but also exceptional athleticism and an ability to push the boundaries of what’s mentally and physically possible.
We had the opportunity to get a behind-the-scenes look from a coaching perspective into what it takes to become a world-class cliff diver with Canadian high diving coach Stéphane Lapointe. Check out some of the insights he had to share below.
Don't miss Molly Carlson look to finish on top of the podium when the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series comes to Canada for the first time ever on August 25, 2024!
To start off, can you give us a little bit of an overview of what you do?
Stéphane Lapointe: Yes, I'm a high dive coach. I’m the head coach at a diving club in Montreal, the CAMO Diving Club, which is the biggest club in Canada. I was a diving coach for a long time on the senior level and I had one athlete who used to do high dives on the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series. I wasn’t following her at competitions but I was coaching her at home, which got me into the sport a little bit which I did myself as a circus athlete when I was younger with some high diving shows.
And then COVID hits and Molly Carlson was the first one to knock on my door and be like, “Yeah, I would like to try [high diving]”. So during COVID Molly tried, and another athlete, Jessica, joined in, and the group just kept getting bigger and bigger. And now I’m 100% in high dive and I have 8 senior athletes competing internationally and Molly is a part of this. Yeah, that's what I do.
Molly Carlson with coach Stéphane Lapointe
© Dean Treml / Red Bull Content Pool
That’s the funny thing about COVID, it was such a challenge for so many people but it also created opportunities to lead to something bigger.
Stéphane Lapointe: Yeah, it was a hard moment. But for me, it was life-changing for sure in terms of my job and also how I do my job. It really puts perspective away from results and more on the journey, putting the athletes up front and making sure they appreciate what they do. You know, there are so many examples of Olympians or Stanley Cup champions that just had negative souvenirs of their career, you know? They’re like, ‘Oh we pushed and pushed to get this, we got it’, but they don’t remember how hard it was. My new philosophy in coaching with high diving is making sure they remember how fun the journey is.
What goes into designing and implementing a training program for cliff divers, and how does it differ from training compared to other sports?
Stéphane Lapointe: There’s a part that is similar, which is planning. Like, making sure we have a manual plan and we follow where the training camps and competitions are, when we need to get ready, what are our goals physically and technically, and also strategic in terms of the dives we’re choosing. But the different part is that high diving is a risky sport, it’s dangerous and scary. My way of coaching high dive is to make sure we’re doing it the safest way possible, even if it is a dangerous sport.
But the mental aspect of the sport is really, really important.
I want the athletes to know that they’re safe, they’re fine when they go in for a new dive even if they know what they’re doing. Yes, it's going to be scary. But mostly in terms of conditions, you never know what to expect, you never know what the view is going to be. The waves, the temperature, the weather.
But the mental aspect of the sport is really, really important. It’s important to talk about it, it’s important to plan it. That’s the biggest difference for me [compared to other sports], with high diving the margin of error is 10 degrees, you know? You can't belly-flop from that high. So we have to make sure we get it right from the first repetition.
Molly Carlson and coach Stéphane Lapointe
© Dean Treml / Red Bull Content Pool
You mentioned the mental aspect and having no room for error. How do you approach the psychological aspects in training?
Stéphane Lapointe: I think the most important part of it is being able to recognize the feelings of your athletes, either in practice or competition, more so in competition, but in practice too. If they don't feel well that day you have to recognize it and be like, “Hey, can I do something? Is it not a good day? We can just postpone it until tomorrow.” You know, be okay with adapting to the condition of the athletes.
Most of the time in sports it’s really about ‘this is the plan and we have to follow it’. I think the mental part of it is to be adaptable based on what your athlete is giving you that day and having open communication. Molly is a good example. Molly is really good with talking and if she doesn’t feel good she will let me know and we’ll sit and have a chat. Sometimes it’s just talking about it, and then she’ll be like, “Okay, I got this”, and she’ll go and execute the plan that we had.
Sometimes we just decide to change the plan and adapt it together. Open communication and empathetic listening are words I use a lot in my coaching to deal with the mental aspect of the challenges.
Is there anything you do differently in training leading up to an event versus a normal or regular training regiment?
Check out some more cliff diving content
Stéphane Lapointe: Yes, actually. The mental aspect. Athletes are going to be more emotional or more nervous if they’re tired. The day before the event, most of the time, they will do basically nothing. Usually, it will be a Friday, because events are usually on Saturday or Sunday, so I call it ‘Friday Fun Day’, you know, so when I send them their plan they’ll see the Friday Fun Day, and then they know they can just relax, have fun and think of something else.
And that’s calming. Usually in many sports, the day before is like drilling repetitions to make sure the next day they’re ready. I think it [needs to be] the opposite, you know? The training is done. You’ve arrived at a competition and you’re ready, or you had a couple of practices, but the day before is to rest, have fun, and calm your mind so that you arrive with an optimal mindset the day of the competition.
Molly Carlson in Boston
© Dean Treml / Red Bull Content Pool
Considering the impact that high dives can have on the body, what sort of recovery methods are important for cliff divers?
Stéphane Lapointe: So the number of repetitions they do up there is something we always think of and count, they can't do a lot. In a practice in one day they’ll do a maximum of 3-4 reps, and in a week it’s a maximum of 10 reps and that’s something that’s always on our minds. With that plan, my athletes are not injured a lot, which is good because I want them to be able to do their sport as long as they want to. Many divers started high diving out of the circus, there was no, like, proper training like it is right now when it started.
It’s unbelievable the different types of environments we have to adapt to.
So they were maybe doing 10-12 repetitions in a day and just going for it. And many of them had quick injuries and didn’t last long in the sport. So I'm really trying to count the repetition that we do in a day, in a week, in a year. I’m always counting. Resting after competition for sure is important, no high dives for at least a week if we can depending on the competition circuit.
High diving is always different. Sometimes you land in a river, sometimes you land in a creek; from a bridge, from a cliff, from a platform. Like, it’s unbelievable the different types of environments we have to adapt to. So that’s why the dives they are doing need to be solid mentally, physically, and technically so we can adapt to the different conditions. Because if you arrive at one of the Red Bull events and you’re scared of your dives, you’re not going to survive and that’s the difference between the stronger athletes and the other ones.
Watch Molly Carlson's dive that secured second place in the women's event at the Polignano a Mare round of the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series:
1 min
Red Bull Cliff Diving Polignano a Mare - Molly Carlson
Here is the video of Molly Carlson's dive to take second place in the women's event at the Polignano a Mare round of the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series
You can put in all of this training and preparation leading up to an event, but once you actually get there is it a whole new situation?
Stéphane Lapointe: Yeah, we never know in advance, you know? We arrive to a site and this is when we see it, we see it the day before the practice starts. We never see it before, we never get pictures of the site or stuff like that. The men’s is always 27m, but the women’s changes from 20m to 22m and we never know that information before arriving on site.
Before the practice, like 10 minutes before the practice starts, we know the height for the women. It’s a big change, you know, if it’s 20m or 22m. It’s completely different for the athletes. Two metres is a big difference in air time, in acceleration, in impact. It’s a huge difference, so for the women, there’s big on-site adapting to do.
What are some of the biggest challenges you face while working with athletes behind the scenes and how do you navigate them?
Stéphane Lapointe: Well, one thing is that it’s such a high-emotion sport. When you come to a competition the view is always amazing, the challenge, a Red Bull competition is like a show. It’s a show more than a competition. It’s both, but it’s crazy. Like, you can have like 80,000 spectators cheering for you and then the competition ends and the next day you go back home.
Three days later you’re back at your regular diving pool. So, motivation is the biggest challenge I have to face with the athletes, because they go from such a high, and in a way, they’re always going to be looking for that high, but it’s not always like that. So, when an athlete starts [training with me] it’s something we need to talk about, it’s like, ‘It’s not always a high and it’s okay’, you know?
Coming back to practice there will be low motivation, so this is when I incorporate games, or fun warmups, or Friday Fun Day, or stuff like that to just make sure they find training as fun as the high thrill of a competition. That for me was my biggest challenge at first, dealing with the change of motivation. I think I can now keep it more level with experience and with talking about it and with them being okay with having lows sometimes. That’s the biggest challenge I have to adapt to.
Red Bull Cliff Diving／高千穂峡
© Jason Halayko / Red Bull Content Pool
Molly Carlson shows the crowd some love
© Dean Treml/Red Bull Content Pool
Rhiannan Iffland at Polignano A Mare
© Romina Amato/Red Bull Content Pool
Molly Carlson dives in Mostar
© Romina Amato/Red Bull Content Pool
The thrill that comes from jumping off a high platform is exhilarating, but it's hard to comprehend how much it increases in front of 80,000 people.
Stéphane Lapointe: That’s the nature of it. And it’s like, in a way it’s my job to make it motivating in practice. It’s a little bit like you, right? Let’s say you do a 10m cliff jump and then I tell you when you do your next one you have to do 20 jumps from the little rock, you know? I have to find a way to make you like the 20 jumps from the little rock before you go back to the really cool 10m cliff.
Looking at long-term development, how do you adapt your training to account for the evolution of the sport?
Stéphane Lapointe: So in Montreal, we started at the Olympic stadium and we have a 20m platform. It was a big tool, and after one year we decided to develop the junior program and for sure the juniors can’t go off of the 20m. Like, they’re too young and aren’t developed yet. So, we built a 12m and a 15m at the Olympic pool too, so now in my group, I have 5 juniors developing and at some point they’ll move up. I already have a 16-year-old male who is doing a 27m list and will be introduced to the senior level soon.
We started with building a senior program and having a full group, and now we’re on to some juniors who are training and diving full-time. Once or twice a week they come with me and develop some high diving skills because they are interested in that. We did host in Montreal the junior world championships on 12 and 15m a year ago, which was very exciting. So that’s the next part is having more people doing it, more countries doing it, and that’s how we’re going to get to the Olympics, you know?
Molly Carlson and Carlos Gimeno celebrate their Mostar wins
© Romina Amato / Red Bull Content Pool
From the sounds of it, it’s a bit about adapting to how things are going but more about creating a foundation to build off.
Stéphane Lapointe: Yes, exactly. Like I said, it's still a new sport, so if you just do what you do and don’t change, it’s not going to develop. You need to build new things, new programs, and new heights, and that’s what we’re trying to do here in Montreal.
What does it take to be a top-performing athlete in a sport that’s as unique as cliff diving? Do some athletes just ‘have it’?
Stéphane Lapointe: I think there are some that have it from the beginning, for sure. Like, Aidan (Heslop) is a good example. Like, he’s a parkour guy, he’s a twisting guy, he's been jumping off cliffs since he was probably 6 years old. He was like, made to do that. Molly is the opposite, she is not a risky girl. She was not the type to go cliff jump. So, I think you can have it, but you can develop it too. It’s not like you have it or you don’t. Yes, you can have it from the beginning and have the skill or you can learn it. There’s no specific profile.
Aidan Heslop drops in for his first win of the 2023 season
© Romina Amato / Red Bull Content Pool
It used to be because it was people out of the circus, and in the circus it’s a very specific type of people who like to do it and like the challenge. But it’s getting less and less like this and becoming more approachable for everyone. If you watch diving at the Olympics, pretty much everyone is doing the same list, the same dives. With high diving, there’s a lot more about their personality and their skills, so there are many different dives.
When I work with an athlete, I need to know what their strengths are, who they are, and they need to show it in their dives. There are many, many different dives and since it’s so high they need to do what they are comfortable with. Aidan is a twister, Molly is not a twister. I have to consider that, I cannot ask them to do dives they won’t feel comfortable with. It’s not achievable, you know?
I like when they’re showing who they are in the air, it’s an artistic sport.
It’s a lot about their strengths but also their personalities. I like when they’re showing who they are in the air, it’s an artistic sport. I see it a little bit as a painting or something, it’s art. It’s cool and it’s risky and it’s hard technically, they’re doing a lot of flips, but it needs to also represent themselves.
For someone who has dreams of becoming a cliff diver or high diver, what words of advice would you give to help them reach their goals?
Stéphane Lapointe: First would be to surround yourself with people who believe in you and believe you can do it, that’s the most important thing because the journey is important. Molly is a good example. She started high diving and she documented everything she did from her first high dive to her being on top of the podium. And she believed in it when people were like ‘Well, we’ll see how she does, it’s a new sport and stuff’.
She believed in it from the beginning and, you know, she has the hashtag #bravegang, she’s big on bringing mental health forward. And that’s a little how I see it, too. Be brave, talk about it, and surround yourself with people that believe in it. Go find opportunities to do that sport if that’s what you want to do and ask questions.
I’m always open if people want to go through Instagram and ask me questions, I can lead them the right way depending on where they live and what they do. But believing in it is the biggest thing. You can do whatever you want to achieve with the right people around you, for sure.
Molly Carlson
© Julien Bru / Red Bull Content Pool
Don't miss Molly Carlson look to finish on top of the podium when the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series comes to Canada for the first time ever on August 25, 2024!
Download the free Red Bull TV app to catch all the action live. Who do you think will take home the King Kahekili trophies?