You may or may not have recently heard that Gary Hunt, a 27 year old British Diver won the Redbull Cliff Diving World Series.

If you don’t know what the Redbull Cliff Diving World Series is, its high diving (around 30m) at its most death-defying. Highly skilled divers have approximately 3 seconds to coordinate their movements into an acrobatic descent before they break the surface of the water at around 100kph. Of course, its judged, and points based out of 10.

I was there for the Athens leg on May 22, and witnessed the awesomeness of the event first-hand (along with a capacity crowd of 9,000).

It’s not everyday you travel to a destination and discover that a World Series event is taking place, but sometimes you just get lucky. This is what I discovered my first day in Athens. I had already organised a CouchSurfing host to meet me on arrival, so we agreed to drop my bags at her flat, then make our way to Lake Vouliagmeni to watch the big event.

The location itself was amazing, and even though the heat was sweltering, spectators had the opportunity to join the action in a secure area in the water.

It wasn’t my first RedBull extreme sports event, I’ve seen the Air Race in my home town for a couple of years running, and knowing how much of a great day out it was, I couldn’t miss the Cliff Diving.

Being a solo traveller, and active CouchSurfer, I listed a meeting on the Athens group for any travellers interested in outdoors and extreme sports to come along and spectate the event with me; my CouchSurfing host from Thessaloniki met us there, but nobody else was able to attend.

Now to the diving: I’m a huge fan of cliff diving as a hobby. But what I do is more “cliff jumping” and sometimes “cliff flopping” (check my Facebook fanpage albums for examples). But these guys are pros. All Olympic level divers, diving from heights that make my knees tremble.

Here’s a YouTube video of the highlights from the day

Some of the dives, as you can see in the video reel were amazing. Michael Navratil even dived from a hand-stand start.

We arrived after the first round of dives had taken place, and spent the next round looking for a good vantage point to be able to see the full dive, as well as the entry into the water. Eventually we managed to find a nice clearing in full view of the dive, and from here we enjoyed the rest of the afternoon to watch Gary Hunt take out the round.

Congratulations Gary on taking out the series (for the 2nd consecutive year). For those with an interest, these are the final standings:

Ian Cartwright

is a guy who gave up his career and mortgage for solo long-term travel. He travelled extensively across Europe for a year before heading onward to North Africa. He is now planning a trip to Latin America. As always there’s sure to be plenty of laughs, tears, and misadventures along the way.