Deep Dive Into The World Of Cliff Diving | E4 The Perfect Entry

Jump into the sport of cliff diving with the sport’s most iconic athletes as they impart their knowledge and experience from years of competition.

Episode 4 - THE PERFECT ENTRY

The impact of hitting the water, known as the entry, is a crucial moment in the cliff diving routine. Orlando Duque, Gary Hunt and Rhiannan Iffland share what makes the perfect entry.
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In aviation, they say that taking off and landing are the most critical stages of flight. They are the crucial moments when pilots really earn their money, and for cliff divers it's a similar story. Spreading their wings from heights of up to 27m, they must then guide their bodies through 3 seconds of acrobatic flight, before safely touching down in the water at speeds of up to 80 km/h. Just one small mistake upon entry can result in a huge hit, both to the body and the scores.

For those who follow Red Bull Cliff Diving, the sound of expert commentator Joey Zuber excitedly proclaiming, "and that is what you call a rip entry!" is a familiar one. It means a diver has successfully completed their mid-air manoeuvres and immersed themselves into the water with barely a bit of splash. The word 'rip', of course, comes from the sound the body makes as it slices perfectly into the lake, river or ocean below. It's similar to the sound of paper being torn, and it is music to the ears of the divers, the commentators and, most importantly, the judges.

"The entry is the final part of the dive," explains Colombian cliff diving legend, Orlando Duque. "Everything already happened in the air and now it's the final moment. Ideally very little splash, hopefully in a very vertical position and that means it's a successful dive."

It sounds simple enough, but with the amount of complexity that athletes pack into those 3 seconds of freefall these days, it's nothing less than stunning how they straighten up their bodies in the final few milliseconds for a perfectly perpendicular entry. And, in most cases, it wouldn't be possible without a secret little weapon they have in their pocket - the barani.

For divers, the barani manoeuvre is undoubtedly the most important part of the dive besides the take-off. It is essentially one forward somersault with half a twist and is used in cliff diving as opposed to regular 10-metre diving, where the athletes hit the water head-first. The barani is the perfect control mechanism that allows the divers to hit the water safely.

"The barani is really where you control the dive," says England's Blake Aldridge, who made the move from the 10m platform to cliff diving following the 2008 Olympics. "Obviously from the platform we initiate all our somersaults and twists, which is what you see at the start of the dives. Then there comes a point when you finish all your tricks and you've got so much momentum, you have to come out and fly and control the barani.

"For me, this has been the hardest transition of learning from Olympic diving to cliff diving. Being able to come out and land on your feet as opposed to 25 years of landing on my head. It's a massive part of the dive and it's the only real way to control things. It's where you get your points, it's what is being judged. And if you can't control the barani, you can't control the entry. So to become consistent, you need a good barani."

So, they've nailed the take-off, packed in a few elegant twists and spins and lined up for entry with a perfect barani. Now for the moment of impact. How does it feel to really rip the water?

"Most of the time when it is a good entry it hurts," says Australia's Rhiannan Iffland. "You are that tight in it, and so tense going through. Usually you have a sense underwater of how the entry has gone, but you don't actually know. Because you can do a perfect entry and it still pulls you around under the water and it still hurts a lot. It's nice to have all those feelings and then everything just goes silent as you slice through the water. It's such a cool feeling to do a proper vertically deep entry."
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Видео Deep Dive Into The World Of Cliff Diving | E4 The Perfect Entry канала Red Bull Cliff Diving