Cliff diving with Mido: “You never conquer the fear. You just learn to manage it”
Luke Benedictus“When you enter the water at that velocity, the impact is severe,” says Eric Brooker, an elite-level diving coach who supervised the judging panel at this year’s Commonwealth Games. “It’s like hitting a bus if you don’t get it right.”
What Brooker is talking about here is cliff diving, the death-defying pursuit considered to be the world’s oldest extreme sport. In the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series – sponsored by the Swiss watch brand, Mido – over a succession of four dives, male cliff divers must propel themselves from a 27m height while the women go from five metres lower. Plummeting from such heights at speeds of up to 85 kmh, if a diver’s body position isn’t perfectly aligned, they can end up with broken limbs, fractured skulls or worse.
One of Mido’s ambassadors is Jonathan Paredes (above), a Mexican cliff diver and former world champion who competed at the final of this year’s competition in Sydney last weekend. Despite being a veteran competitor, Paredes admits that the mental challenge never goes away whenever he climbs up to the platform. “There are a lot of things going on. Fear. Tension. Pressure,” Paredes admits. “It’s not a walk in the park.”
“You never conquer the fear. You just learn to manage it. If you lose the fear, that’s the moment to retire.”
In fact, he explains, fear is a vital accomplice in cliff-diving, because it forces you to focus harder and confront the magnitude of your challenge. Back-flipping off a 27m drop there is zero room for complacency. Fear makes you face up to the gravity of the situation in every sense.
Not that Paredes is likely to forget the mortal stakes following his experience at the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series in France’s Saint-Raphaël last year. “I had an accident in training,” he tells Time+Tide. “When I jumped off the platform, everything fell apart. My body didn’t connect with my mind and I got ‘lost’ in the air. That’s your absolute worst fear as a cliff diver.
“Coming down it’s only about three seconds of free fall, but in that situation, it feels like forever. You know everything has gone wrong, and you’re just waiting for that impact. I was really scared. Really scared.”
“I landed on my back from 27 metres. When you hit the water like that, it’s not about the pain, it’s more that you just feel so disorientated, so confused. The next thing I remember, were the scuba divers pulling me out and then being taken to hospital.”
Luckily, Paredes escaped physically unscathed, but the mental damage was deep. In the first event of the new season in Boston, he lined up to compete again only for his self-preservation instinct to rebel when it came to the crunch.
“I climbed up the platform thinking, ‘I’m ready to do this.’ But once I reached the edge, my mind started overthinking all the worst-case scenarios: ‘It will happen again! I’m going to kill myself! What am I doing here?” My mind was so bad, I was like, ‘I can’t do this!’
Most divers would have taken that as their cue to retire. But having pulled out of that event, the Mido ambassador was determined to overcome his trepidation and fronted up once again at the next competition in Paris. Standing on the platform above the Seine directly across from the Eiffel Tower, there was, Paredes admits, a lot of positive self-talk required to convince himself to dive off.
“I said to myself: ‘Okay, I’m scared – I’m diving from 27 metres. But I can control it because I’ve trained for this for so many years.’ I just focused on blocking everything else out and concentrating on what I had to do. It didn’t matter that the crowd was loud. It didn’t matter there were 3000 people watching me. Nothing mattered. I was just there on my own. The world disappears in that second. It’s just you and the platform and the water. And then you just jump…”
Paredes’ successful dive in Paris broke his mental hoodoo. Since then, he has gone on to compete in Denmark, Norway, Bosnia, Switzerland and Italy before last week’s event in Sydney. So far, he concedes, he hasn’t recovered peak form, but what he has regained is his composure and his willingness to put his body on the line.
“Whatever you’re attempting in life, it’s OK to feel scared,” the 33-year-old says. “But you also have to try and stay rational and focus on the elements that you can control. That’s the only way that you can ever manage to do your thing.”
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