If your friend jumped off a cliff, would you follow them? The answer was an enthusiastic “yes!” for the 24 world-class divers who leapt into Boston Harbor this weekend.

“There is an incredible sense of camaraderie in the sport of cliff diving,” the announcer at Red Bull’s Cliff Diving World Series said on Saturday. “Everyone wants to see their friends succeed.”

The Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series made its final stop of the season in Seaport on Sept. 19 and 20, after earlier stops in the Philippines, Italy, and Bosnia and Herzegovina this year. Despite the lack of natural cliffs in Boston, divers leapt off platforms atop the Institute of Contemporary Art and enjoyed the attention of more than a thousand audience members.

Red Bull cliff diving dates back to 2009, but the sport originated centuries ago in Hawaii. King Kahekili, the series trophy namesake, was a Hawaiian chief who first dove from the cliffs of Kaunolo, a site on the island of Lanai, in the 1700s. 

Aaron Kelly, who has followed the series around the world this year watching his daughter, American diver Maya Kelly, said he appreciated the setting. This year was 18-year-old Kelly’s first season competing on the Red Bull circuit.

“To see her have fun and be able to showcase her skills on this kind of stage … as a parent, it makes you super proud,” Kelly said in an interview with The Beacon.

All of the stops on the tour are popular, but Boston is one of the most convenient—and enjoyable—locations, which divers and their families said they were grateful for.

“This setting in Boston is one of the best stops that Red Bull does,” Kelly said. “It’s beautiful. [There are] tons of fans, the weather has been awesome. [Maya] had the time of her life.”

“Boston is always a cool one,” Simone Leathead, the women’s third-place finisher, told The Beacon. “A lot of people show up, and it’s just so fun to have the crowd going, and especially when the weather is nice [like today], it’s the perfect conditions.”

In the competition, 12 divers in each category dive off of platforms—88.5 feet for men and 69 feet for women—four times each. Their dives are scored by a panel of five judges who base their scores on takeoff, air position, and water entry. The two highest and lowest scores are discarded, and the middle three are added and multiplied by the dive’s difficulty to get the final score. 

Boston was the final stop of the 2025 season, so divers were competing not only for the individual win but also for the series trophy. In the women’s category, 34-year-old Rhiannan Iffland of Australia has been dominant with eight series wins in a row. She has also been a force this season, with wins in each of the three stops before Boston.

Going into the final round on Saturday, Iffland once again topped the leaderboard, with Canada’s Molly Carlson close behind. For her final dive, Carlson completed an inward three somersault half twist dive and received a total score of 96.2 points to put her in first place. As Iffland walked out onto the end of the diving board, the crowd of thousands was blanketed in silence. In a dramatic turn, she completed the same exact dive as Carlson but received a score of 99.9 to cement her ninth world title victory in a row. 

After three years in a row of second-place finishes, Carlson came closest to dethroning Iffland this season. She was able to close the deficit to just 16 points after trailing by more than double that last year. 

Leathead, a Canadian, has been diving since she was four years old but has only high-dived for the past three and a half years. According to her, cliff diving is as much a mental sport as a physical one.

“I’m really trying to be in the moment [on the platform] so I’m grounding myself and trying to appreciate everything that’s going on,” she told The Beacon. “I’m not trying to think too much forward or about the past—just being in the moment.”

Hailing from Montreal, many of Leathead’s relatives made the trip to Boston to watch her dive.

“I’m super grateful my whole family is here,” she said while holding her trophy. “It’s just so nice to have them here and be able to showcase my talent to everybody that showed up.”

For the men’s category, Frenchman Gary Hunt was the favorite to take the series win going into the event. Hunt has been dominant in the sport since its first year, winning ten out of the total 16 seasons. Despite an eighth-place finish in Boston, Hunt had built up enough of a lead in the previous three events to take home his eleventh world series title.

Coming off a gold medal performance at the World Aquatics Championships in Singapore earlier this year and a second-place finish in Bosnia and Herzegovina at the beginning of the month, American James Lichtenstein had momentum coming into Boston. Invigorated by the home crowd, he went into the final round atop the leaderboard.

Catalin Preda, from Romania, faced an injury last year in Boston while attempting the world’s hardest dive: a back four and a half somersault from a handstand position. This year, in what was a triumphant comeback, he successfully completed the dive for a score of 153, the highest of any dive throughout the event.

Despite Preda’s comeback story and best efforts, Lichtenstein’s consistency throughout the previous rounds set him up for victory, as he received the exact score he needed from the judges in his final dive to edge Preda out by less than one point.

Samantha Gillis, a former Div. I diver at Notre Dame University, was in the crowd supporting Lichtenstein, her friend and former teammate.

“It’s excellent to see [James] win,” she said. “Diving is not a sport that gets a lot of publicity, so it’s really cool to see Red Bull expanding in this space and putting on exhibitions like this. I think more people should be into the sport, for sure.”

The awards ceremony capped off the competition, and divers celebrated in showers of champagne. As the thousands of attendees filed out of the crowded pier, the athletes could be seen signing autographs, taking selfies with passionate fans, and reuniting with their families. The buzz from the day’s competition lingered through Seaport long after the final dive.

Bryce Heilmann of The Beacon staff contributed reporting to this story.