The Red Bull Cliff Diving Season Has Begun!

Imagine. You’re on the tips of your toes. Your muscles already ache from the climb up a jagged and bramble-strewn rock face. You focus that pain. Below is about 95-feet of air, and then… water.

Gravity teases you. “All you have to do is jump,” it promises. “I’ll take over after that.”

You launch your body up and out. Your muscles bend and twist as quickly as possible — your endless training reveals itself. Then, impact. For a moment, your body had been transformed into a projectile, so it’s no surprise that you pierced the water like one. You kick hard for the surface and the crowd erupts.

Cliff Diving has been around for a long time. During the late 1700s, King Kahekili II of Maui enacted it as an official sport. He’d have his soldiers dive from high cliffs to prove their mettle and loyalty. If that seems like an extreme test, it was. Kahekili was an extreme dude. One side of his body was tattooed from head to toe. He built a house out of the bones of his fallen enemies from O’ahu. So forcing his subjects to cliff dive acrobatically seems almost tame by comparison.

High diving gained popularity a century later when acrobats were searching for a soft landing place to practice their moves. Water made the most sense. By the early 1900s, high diving was an Olympic sport.

Last month marked the beginning of Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series in Texas. This is their seventh year, and it’s more popular than ever. The world tour will follow 16 competitors (plus wildcard divers) from 10 countries as they leap off of nine iconic cliffs around the world. The grace of the dives make them extremely entertaining to watch live. The sport has gained considerable popularity with up to 70,000 spectators showing up to watch the events live. That’s equal to the amount of people who show up to NFL games.

This year’s first tour stop was held at Hell’s Gate at Possum Kingdom Lake in Texas. The divers braved the 28m (92ft) dive for a spectacular opening event. Texans certainly don’t need a lot of excuses to go out and drink some beer while chilling on a lake all day, and they came out en masse to watch the divers perform. Let’s hope they took all their garbage with them when they left.

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More recently, the divers gathered in Denmark outside the Copenhagen Opera House. As a thunderstorm turned the skies a deep gray, men and women flung themselves into Københavns havn. The backdrop of rock and scrub from Texas was replaced with neoclassical domes and Danish cobbles. The excitement-level was just as high.

As the season carries on, divers will jump in Italy, France, Azores, the UK, Bosnia, Japan, and the UAE. Not a bad way to tour around the world.

Watching the divers, you can’t help but be reminded of Leni Riefenstahl’s iconic Olympia and her rendering of bodies as they danced through the air and plummeted into the waters of Berlin’s Olympic pools. There’s something hypnotically magical about the grace and control of a human dancing through the air with gravity as they fall towards the water. The diver’s ability to exert so much control over their muscles and movements as they allow gravity to control them is a gentle balance of human will versus the laws of nature. And it’s definitely worth paying attention to.

You can follow the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series here.