Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series 2015 – The basics of Cliff Diving – Cartagena, Colombia

The Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series starts on April 25 in Cartagena, Colombia this year. The location at Cartagena’s Convention Center with its splendid view over the bay of Las Ánimas provides for a proper location to launch into the seventh season. Six months after the coronation of four-time World Series champion Gary Hunt at the grand final in Mexico, 10 of the world's best cliff divers and four wildcards will be diving from 27 metres-high in their bid for glory during eight competit...

Colombia’s Cartagena hosted the season-opener of the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series 2015 on April 25th. The world’s best cliff divers gathered at the Convention Center in Cartagena to leap aesthetically from the 27 meters platform. The beautiful seaside city, surrounded by 400-year-old city walls was a convenient venue for the kick-off event of this brand-new cliff diving season. 30.000 enthusiastic spectators witnessed cliff diving legend Orlando Duque (COL) and 13 of his most talented c...

It was a season-start in style for four-time World Series champion Gary Hunt, who dominated the first competition of the 2015 season in Colombia’s Cartagena, making it his 20th victory in seven years of the World Series. The Brit's haul of 526.20 points is his second-highest score to date, and just 0.20 points short of his personal best. 30,000 vocal spectators cheered their local hero Orlando Duque (477.60pts) to a podium finish from the 27m-platform on the Centro de Convenciones and secured...

The hat-trick in wins went to the apparently unstoppable 30-year-old Gary Hunt, while Colombian legend Orlando Duque (478.70pts.) made it his third podium in three competitions and settled old scores with this location as he had finished bottom of the standings after a failed dive the previous year. Completing the podium was the third winner of a World Series, Russia’s Artem Silchenko (466.90pts.), who earlier beat American Andy Jones in his head-to-head by another very narrow margin, and lea...

With two 10s from the judges and the highest-scoring three-second dive of the whole competition, Englishman Gary Hunt makes it three wins out of three with a new personal-best score of 533.90 points in Texas. The season’s third stop operated under a revised schedule due to the probability of severe weather conditions in the region and produced a World Series champions’ podium, as Orlando Duque, from Colombia, and Artem Silchenko, from Russia – the winners in 2009 and 2013 – completed the top-...

During the season opener in Cartagena, the Divers showed they have spent their off-season perfecting their technique, learning new dives and adding more difficulty to the World Series. Now it is time for the second stop in the French La Rochelle. It was later the overall champion Artem Silchenko who took victory during the divers’ last appearance in 2013 in front of the biggest crowd ever for a World Series event of 70,000 spectators. Can he repeat this feat this year or will four-time champi...

In the competition divers need to perform 4 dives each. Two easy dives called required dives and two difficult dives called optional dives. The easy dives are to show form and grace and the difficult dives are about doing as many somersaults and twists as possible. There are rules to follow about the types dives the athletes can perform and the direction of take off as well. How hey choose it? How they decide execute one dive and not a different one. © Red Bull Media House

The 2015 World Series, with two stops down, has been very much in English hands – two victories by Gary Hunt, a fourth and a second place for Blake Aldridge make it 670 points for the duo from the United Kingdom. When the cliff diving elite comes back to the 27m platform on Hell’s Gate at Possum Kingdom Lake, Texas, on May 29, it is a return to the venue where in 2014 the competition turned into a high-scoring shootout. And it was ‘brilliant Brit’ Gary Hunt who made his mark with the highest...