Rhiannan Iffland comes from a country where there are no suitable cliffs to practise, yet will shortly be crowned the world’s best cliff diver for the eighth-straight time.
The 33-year-old is the face of the glitzy world high diving tour, and is sponsored by the globe’s biggest energy drink. But speak to her and Iffland is self-deprecating and disarming.
“I’ve kind of always been someone who, if a door, an opportunity is there, I open the door and I give it a go. So I really just fell into this, into cliff diving,” Iffland says ahead of the final round of the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series in Sydney this weekend.
Her chosen sport is spectacular; a mix of wonder and fear stretching back to its roots as a Hawaiian test of warriors’ courage. Yet Iffland won’t boast about the fact her career achievements match or exceed those of just about any Australian athlete.
Surfer Layne Beachley won six consecutive world titles, motorcyclist Mick Doohan five-straight world championships. Before them, there was Dawn Fraser with three Olympic 100m freestyle golds. And, of course, Donald Bradman. But none have been as consistent as Iffland in their dominance.
“To be honest, sometimes I’m still trying to explain it to myself, like how have I been so consistent?,” Iffland says. “I think the recipe is hard work and passion and persistence.
“Look, I’m a little bit of a show-off as well, I like to get up there and do a good dive. And as much as I love what I do and I have fun, I’m competitive.”
She describes her sport as “the rock and roll of diving, the AC/DC of the diving world”. Yet it has traditionally been one on the periphery for governing body World Aquatics. It does not feature in the Olympics, and high diving was only added to the world championships in 2013.
Iffland – who also won her fourth-straight World Aquatics high diving gold medal in February – says the discipline is growing. But with a separate schedule and international tour, it remains out of sight for much of the Australian diving community.
When Iffland trains with Olympic divers, her all-round mastery can even surprise. “What they usually say to me – and it kind of annoys me sometimes – they’re like, ‘Oh, you’re diving just as good as us on the 3m’, and I’m like, ‘Well, yeah, I have been doing it for 20 years’.”
The veteran once shared a similar dream as those training partners: of wearing the green and gold at the Olympic Games. But when her promise in conventional diving at the highest level petered out as a teenager, her athletics aspirations appeared at an end. Instead, a career in the police force looked her most likely path.
“I had my application ready to go, and my dad actually said to me, ‘Oh, why don’t you just wait a couple of years? Go live a little bit and then come back and see what you want to do’,” Iffland says. “And that’s when the cruise ship opportunity came up.”
Not long out of high school, she spent 10 months performing on a cruise ship, and saw for the first time the spectacle of high diving. In competition, women jump from 21m – more than twice the height of the tower at the local pool – and men even higher.
Immediately, she knew she wanted to be up there, but without formal training, she wasn’t allowed. So she contacted other divers to see how she could pursue it, and she ended up working at a theme park in France, Walibi Rhône-Alpes. “I was doing 10m on the cruise ship, and then I went to a theme park to learn, and then I came back to the cruise ship as a high diver,” she says. “Because it was the rules on the ship, you couldn’t do a high dive if you weren’t employed as a high diver.”
Iffland stepped up from 10m, to 17m, and beyond, over hundreds of dives in three years working at sea and training in France. But above 20m, even the best in the world are challenged.
She was reminded of that in 2016, in her first World Cup event. Iffland finished the competition in Abu Dhabi in last place, after a botched first dive left her winded and needing the safety scuba divers to help her from the water.
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Within three months of that inglorious debut, Iffland had a wildcard to the Red Bull world series. Eight seasons later, she has an unassailable lead over Canadian Molly Carlson going into this year’s final round.
The cliff diving series visits eight exotic locations each year, including Paris, Mostar and a gorge in Japan befitting a fairytale. But for Iffland, home on the beaches just south of Newcastle in New South Wales is never far away.
“There’s always that moment where I get on the platform, mixing the fear with the pressure of the competition,” she says. “Knowing people are watching you and you’re under pressure to perform. I always take a moment and close my eyes, and I disappear.”
“I go to the beach in Catherine Hill Bay with my niece, or I imagine myself at home drinking a wine with my family and friends. Just disappear and then open my eyes again, and then: ‘I’m here, now I just have to focus completely on what I have to do.’”
The world series has previously included a round on the Hawkesbury River west of Sydney with a platform built out from the cliff. But unlike in places like Bari in Italy – where a safe launch and landing is available in the waters off a beach in the centre of town – Australia’s cliffs are typically too remote for divers to frequent.
Training camps at facilities in Austria or Florida in the US provide athletes like Iffland the chance to hone their skills at competition heights, but whacking into the water hundreds of times a year takes its toll.
“Usually for me, I get the impact through my hips and the lower back,” Iffland says. “The feet, you get used to it [the pain] when you haven’t dived in a while, the slap on your feet is quite intense, but usually it’s more like the lower back and the neck.”
Partly out of minimising damage to her body, and partly out of convenience, Iffland spends much of her off-season at Sydney Olympic Park on a 10m platform. This period is spent breaking down a dive into two halves, before eventually combining the top and bottom parts when she competes overseas.
For someone who spent three years performing to cruisegoers, and another near-decade in front of thousands on the world tour, Iffland’s highest dive – at 24m – came on a 2018 adventure to the Northern Territory, where she leaped into Nitmiluk Gorge surrounded by no-one but her crew.
“That’s been my highest for sure, but before I finish my career, I want to do 27,” she says. “Probably until I get up there and have a look over the edge, then I might change my mind.”
