Standing at 5’6”, Rhiannan Iffland is that rare breed of extreme athlete.
She’s a cliff diver. And she’s a champion who’s ruled her division in the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series since 2016, through a dominant three-peat performance. It’s the kind of successive wins that no woman has ever done since the sport was founded 10 years ago.
Cliff diving sounds like one of those events in the heyday of the 1990s X-Games when extreme sports held sway over the grunge-hypnotized masses. But Red Bull’s event was founded just fairly recently, in 2009. A cousin of the highboard dive and the Olympic dive commonly called “fancy diving,” its strain of athletic aquatics still has all the bells and whistles, the somersaults and twists we’ve come to expect.
The key differences are what make it so dangerous, though. There’s no diving springboard, for one, the platform is fixed so there’s no bounce and they do it at 20 meters high (27 meters for the men). When they do fall, divers have around three seconds for all the tricks they want to do and then land feet first—another crucial difference from other diving disciplines.
Since cliff divers launch themselves from such dizzying heights they reach speeds up to 85kph, and that’s where the rigorous discipline comes into play. Not just the ability to control your body for the fancy twists and turns but to land safely, without going horizontal or entering the water via a “pancake landing.” They hit the water at twice, or even thrice, the force of gravity so divers need to tense their muscles and literally brace for impact.
That splash-less entry in the water? It’s what separates adepts from the rest, the signature of a master diver. If you’re not completely vertical, then it’ll be like colliding with concrete. They hit the water so fast that they actually create what resembles a bombhole, that mushroom-shaped cloud that explosives leave in their wake.
We sat down for a quick interview with the reigning champ, a phenom the world calls “The Aussie Sensation,” at the Rizal Memorial Complex in Pasay City, a week before she flew off to El Nido, Palawan, where the first leg of the 2019 competition would take place.
What do you love about this sport?
Once you actually pull off the dive and you overcome that feeling you’re just overwhelmed with excitement. It makes me feel encouraged about myself to go right back up there and try again.
It’s a pretty dangerous sport as well, from what we gather.
It’s really important to respect the height and respect the danger of it. If you don’t that’s when silly injuries happen. There’s not a lot of room for error.
Speaking of injuries, on September 15, 2017, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, you got a nearly devastating injury but you were still able to compete and emerge as the champ that year. How did you pull that off?
I suffered an injury to both knees and they were strained MCLs. That was tough. I had six weeks to recover for the final event. My dives were really risky. I had two knee braces almost right before the dive. The hardest part was not to train really hard while fighting off those negative feelings. My partner, who’s also my coach, and I worked really hard on my rehabilitation. Just taking baby steps. It was really nerve-wracking to turn up and not know if I was really going to be able to dive.
But how did you prepare or train if you were forbidden from diving?
The week before I arrived [in Italy] I wasn’t sure if I was going to dive. So, I would walk to the platform and have a look down, and I would familiarize myself with the surroundings and actually go through the dive in my head. That was my training in recovery. I focused on what I had to do, what I thought it was going to feel like so that if I actually did get to dive it would make it slightly easier since I’d already done the mental processing in my head.
And it looks like it worked wonders. You finished first in the Polignano a Mare leg in Italy that year
Visualization helped me a lot. I managed to do four dives at that event, completely cold meaning I hadn’t done any warm up dives prior to it or anything like that. The hardest part was not to train really hard while fighting off those negative feelings
For your run this year, what keeps you motivated to keep pursuing that cliff-diving crown even if you’ve already win it three years in a row?
It’s a big challenge to break my personal best again. I’m definitely a very driven athlete when it comes to cliff diving. There’s going to be hurdles along the way but it’s what drives athletes: that feeling of overcoming challenges. For me it’s how, on a day-to-day basis, I’m overcoming my fears. That feeling is what always pulls me back.
Like Fil-Australian teen Xantheia Pennisi, you’re the idol of so many young cliff divers. Any tips for these new athletes?
Drill, drill, drill. It’s not like you go straight from 10 to 20. And don’t let your fears get in the way of your dreams. That’s one thing I found really hard coming into this sport. To try and control the fear and to convince myself that it’s a good idea to jump off a platform you must really perfect the basics and fundamentals before you go up there. I believe that’s going to make it that much of an easier transition. Just trusting yourself is important. There’s going to be hurdles along the way but it’s what drives athletes: overcoming those hurdles, that feeling of overcoming challenges.