The ultimate leap of faith
What drives young Australian adrenaline junkie Helena Merten to want to jump off cliffs for sport?
By Alle McMahon
Faith, for many, would be a hard thing to come by standing on Hell’s doorstep. But for rookie Australian cliff diver Helena Merten, it is do or die.
She is standing on the edge of a wooden platform atop the rocky cliffs of Devil’s Island in Texas, and is a picture of composure.
Twenty metres below her a murky underworld awaits: the open waters of Hell’s Gate.
And as if that doesn’t sound hellish enough, she’s standing not on her feet, but on her hands, in a handstand.
In an instant she flips off the platform and summersaults, glides, turns and pin drops into the water.
She makes barely a splash, but in the wider sport of cliff diving, it’s a different story.
Taking the plunge
At 21 years old, Helena is the youngest diver to compete in a Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series’ permanent line-up.
Each year the competition flies an elite group of athletes around the world for the ultimate dive-off.
From the top of a 16th-century bridge in Bosnia and Herzegovina, to the windy, jagged cliffs of Wales, the divers put on a nail-biting show of their best acrobatic tricks while free-falling at speeds of up to 80 kilometres an hour and from heights as high as 28 metres, all in a bid to be crowned international champion.
This weekend, Helena will compete in the semi-final of the world series in Japan, before heading off to the grand final in Dubai later this month.
Unsurprisingly, when Helena first told her mum she had made the team, she was “not very happy”.
“She was pretty upset, and I told her what did she expect, because I had been interested in sports my whole life and [doing] crazy things,” Helena said.
Since the age of five, Helena has trained in acrobatic sports from the gymnastics that you see in the Olympics, to tumbling, diving and circus.
Then at the age of 17, Helena was fresh out of high school when she moved abroad to work as the youngest acrobat at the world’s largest water-based acrobatic show, The House of Dancing Water, in Macau.
“I had no experience in shows whatsoever. I did some small gigs on the Gold Coast but nothing crazy. That was really a dream come true and I was pinching myself the whole time I was there,” she said.
It was there that she was first introduced to high diving and encouraged to try out for the Red Bull series.
“I didn’t think I would get on the full series at all,” Helena said.
“I really was just going in because they fly you to a country and then they fly you home. You don’t have any expenses and it was kind of just like a spontaneous thing I guess, like: ‘Oh well, I do the high diving thing so if the opportunity comes up, even if I come last I get to travel to different countries’.”
To this day, Helena’s mum has never seen her daughter cliff dive in person, but Helena said that might be for the best.
“I think she’d be way too nervous,” she said.
“I think at competitions, the last thing you want is a nervous parent clinging on to you. It’s an extreme sport so it is very dangerous.”
G-forces, blood and a broken rib
There is no doubt cliff diving is risky.
After jumping from such great heights, divers can hit the water with an impact of up to 5 gs.
To put that into perspective, the maximum g-force NASA astronauts feel during a shuttle launch is about three.
High g-forces can cause serious injuries, including loss of consciousness, broken bones, and shifting of internal organs.
“Trying to get health insurance for cliff diving is pretty hard. No-one wants to cover the sport,” Helena said.
“One of the girls in the last competition, she landed with her chest forward a couple of times and she had to go to hospital because she was spitting out a lot of blood. She had to pull out of the competition, so it can be pretty rough in that way.”
Fortunately for Helena, a suspected broken rib is the worst injury she has encountered, and she puts that down to training.
“On the training days I’m going up and down and up and down. I can really feel it in my body the next day, but it’s the only time that I get to train. I like to be reassured,” she said.
‘Blanking out’ and trusting your body
Training for cliff diving is difficult.
At the moment Helena is without a coach, so she relies on feedback from some of her fellow, more experienced competitors.
“I’m not a professional platform diver, I’m a cliff diver so it’s nice to get lots of different feedback,” she said.
“I guess I get little bits of feedback from all over the world, which is really nice.”
Training pools also generally only offer diving platforms up to 10 metres high.
“There’s actually no 20-metre platform that you can train on. There’s one in Austria, but it is only open for six months in the year,” Helena said.
“I have to do basically half of my dive, and then when I go to the competition I do the first half and then the second half is just what I’ve rehearsed before at 20 metres.
“It’s very tricky in that way to come to a competition after a month or two off and stand on a 20-metre platform and go: ‘Okay, well I hope my body remembers what to do’.”
In that way, Helena says cliff diving can be as much a mental sport, as it is a physical one.
“Just before I go I think I just completely blank everything out and just trust my body to do it and not let my mind distract me,” she said.
“Because you don’t have much training, you have to go up there and tell yourself that your body knows exactly what to do and its done it before and it can do it again very easily,” she said.
“[You] just [have to] be confident in yourself, because if you have a moment in the air where you doubt yourself or you think of something else that you shouldn’t have, then it can be really, really bad.”
Helena is currently sitting fourth in the competition, behind fellow Australian Rhiannon Iffland — who this year entered the series as a wildcard — in first place.
