Athlete Profile

• Name: Danny Christie
• College: St Catharine’s
• Degree: Veterinary Medicine – 3rd Year
• Hometown: Inverness

Danny Christie has been diving for little over a year. He is currently the captain and president of the Cambridge University Diving Team and was a key member of the squad that won the last two Varsity competitions – the first to ever have been staged – against Oxford.

Can you give us a brief summary of diving?

The goal is to perform the best dive you can with the best execution, which comes down to the tightness of your shape, how pointed your toes are, the height of the dive, the distance you get from the board or the platform and – if you’re doing a synchronised dive – the symmetry between you and your partner. There’s a lot of points for your entry into the water: you’ve ideally got to enter the water with what’s known as a ‘rip’ rather than a big splash.

Each dive has a difficulty tariff depending on what’s involved – the positions and the number of spins mainly – and that tariff is multiplied by the average of the marks that were awarded by the five different judges. That means you can still score the same amount of points if you perform a more difficult dive not as well as you perform an easier one.

There are two different types of diving really: the springboard and the platform, both of which can be at different heights. The main difference between the two is how you take off from them because it’s harder to generate height on the platform.

How did you first get into the sport?

I’m relatively unusual for a diver: I don’t have a background in gymnastics or trampolining. Instead, my buzz for diving came from ‘dooking’: it was a popular pastime in my coastal town in Northern Scotland, where you’d jump off piers into a harbour. So I’ve always enjoyed the premise of diving, and then I saw Tom Daley on TV and thought ‘that looks fun’. So I tried diving at the end of first year when I discovered we had a club, and it went on from there!

What is the hardest thing about diving?

The mental aspect is the toughest thing really – a lot of the basic dives aren’t that difficult to do – but it takes a lot of convincing your body’s subconscious to pull off some of the moves. You have to be quite strong-minded: the boards don’t look that high from the ground, but when you get up to the top of the five-metre board, it feels like an insane height. You’ve got be a little bit stupid, or a little bit crazy to try it – which I guess is proven by my background in ‘dooking’ into the freezing North Sea! But you develop a certain degree of immunity to it all as you go on – though that can go on competition day!

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What traits helps facilitate success in your sport?

There are quite a few really. If you’re not too tall, you can get faster spins and if you’re quite springy, you can generate extra height on the jump that allows you to pull off more moves as you dive. You’ve got to be quite strong to be able to move your body against the gravity and g-force too! But it’s not a sport that requires you to be massively muscular or athletic: if you look at the divers – particularly the Chinese ones – they’re quite lean and not major bodybuilders.

Who is the world's most famous diver?

It’s difficult to say because diving as a major spectator sport is a very recent phenomenon. If you ask within the sport, you’d probably get some of the Chinese competitors who have had incredible levels of success over the year. But in a more general sense, especially in the UK, it has to be Tom Daley because of the publicity he received when he first started at such a young age.

What is the state of diving in Cambridge, in the UK, and internationally?

At Cambridge diving club, there’s so many new people trying it – we have a huge range of abilities – and it’s really a good sport for beginners that’s not too tiring. The gender divide we saw in Team GB’s Olympic successes aren’t reflected here: lots of the girls at Cambridge are ex-gymnasts or trampolinists who can already pull off incredible moves, so they’re used to being in the air and doing all the amazing moves!

The amount of Cambridge students at the sessions varies – we do a number of our sessions with members of the public too – but on average, it’s about six or seven Cambridge students. A lot of people don’t take it that seriously: it’s just a laugh really. The coaches are really nice and a lot of the locals who turn up are lovely too. We train at the Parkside Pool next to Parker’s Piece where Rio 2016 bronze medallist Dan Goodfellow trained, and that’s got platforms with heights from 1m all the way up to the 5m and 3m springboards too, plus a bubble machine!

On a national level, a lot of people are aware of diving as a sport – it’s been given a lot of press thanks to Tom Daley and the other successes of the Olympics – but not a lot of people know how few people do it. Indeed, the facilities are hard to come by in some areas of the country. I’m from the North of Scotland, and the nearest one to me is 2 hours away. But it’s become really popular in the South of England, where there are a lot of pools.

Internationally speaking, it’s grown in popularity around the world, particularly in the USA where a lot of the universities have great facilities. Of course, it’s really competitive, but it’s honestly so: there have been no major doping scandals because it’s so new that there are not enough people to really do that.

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What is your training schedule like?

You can train up to three times a week actually at Parkside Pool in the water. And then you can supplement that at home in the gym but that’s up to you really. I don’t do much more – just a bit of free weights for the strength, and a fair bit of stretching and yoga to help with the flexibility. Any cardio you do is to try and stay lean because the only major energy expenditure in diving is climbing the stairs to the platform!

How do you reconcile that training schedule with your Cambridge workload?

It helps that most of the training sessions are in the evening, so they’re generally out of the way of supervisions and lectures. I treat it as a break from the work I have. Diving’s not a high-commitment sport, but it offers a great way to escape from the pressures and stress of a Cambridge workload.

How might somebody interested in diving get involved?

They would get involved through the Cambridge University Diving Team. Any student studying at Cambridge can join us for a free taster session at any point during the year. Our website is the best place to visit for more information, and you can also keep track of things using our Facebook page. If people have any specific questions, though, they can email me too (divingclub@cusu.cam.ac.uk).

This interview has been edited for length and clarity