Orlando Duque

Orlando Duque performing a jump during a competition in Boston (2012)

Orlando Duque (born September 11, 1974 in Cali ) is a Colombian cliff diver and former art and high diver . He has been one of the world's best cliff divers since the late 1990s and has won the world title nine times in the course of his career. In 2013 Duque also won the cliff jumping competition , which was included for the first time by the world swimming federation FINA in the program of the swimming world championships .

biography

Career as an art and high diver

Orlando Duque was born in Cali in southwest Colombia in 1974, where he also grew up. At the age of ten, he turned from soccer training to art and tower diving and completed his first jump from the 3-meter board. Duque then trained up to six hours a day and won several national championship titles in the following years. In 1992 he qualified for the Olympic Games in Barcelona , but could not take part in the Summer Olympics due to a lack of funds from the Colombian Skydiving Association. Disappointed, Duque ended his athletic career and began university.

Two years later, the Colombian was enthusiastic about cliff jumping, an extreme sport in which you can jump in the water from heights of up to 28 meters in nature and combine diving techniques such as somersaults and twists . Duque made his first cliff jump in 1995 at a local event in his hometown of Cali. He gained more routine with water jumps from great heights through an engagement in a Colombian amusement park. Between 1997 and 1999 Duque worked in the summer months in the Gänserndorf safari park near Vienna , where he did water jumps from a 25 meter high crane as a stuntman .

Success as a cliff diver

In 1999 Orlando Duque joined the High and Cliff Diving World Cup circus and in the same year won the silver medal behind the Australian Steve Black at the third World Championships . In 2000 he outclassed Black in the qualifying competitions in Croatian Dubrovnik and Swiss Brontallo and won the title for the first time at the World Championships in Kaunolu, Hawaii, ahead of the two Americans Dustin Webster and Todd Michael , where he won the third and final jump of all seven judges Received the highest grade of 10.0 points. This earned him an entry in the Guinness Book of Records . In the following years Duque became the most elegant and world's best cliff diver. Based on his family name, he earned the nickname "The Duke" (German: "The Duke"; briefly also referred to as " Jimmy Hendrix of cliff jumping") and counts the so-called back twists among his favorite jumps . He successfully defended the world championship title in 2001 and 2002, led the World Cup rankings during this time and lost only one competition. In 2005 he won his ninth world title in front of 3,000 spectators at the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Championships. On the 27-meter-high platform on Wolfgangsee , he achieved the daily maximum of 351 points with a triple backflip with two screws and relegated the Russian Sergey Zotin , world champion of 2003, and his compatriot Andriy Ignatenko to their places. At the Cliff Jump World Championships in Brontallo in July 2006, Duque won the bronze medal with 349.125 points behind Ignatenko (360.125) and Zotin (356.550).

In September 2009 in Athens , Duque succeeded in winning the cliff jumping, organized for the first time by Red Bull as a World Series . In the following years he had to admit defeat to the British Gary Hunt - in 2011 Duque could not start in the final competition in Athens due to a foot injury, in 2012 he narrowly lost the final to Hunt. In 2013, the world swimming federation FINA officially included cliff jumping in the program of the 15th World Swimming Championships for the first time . In the title fights in Barcelona at the end of July, Duque won the gold medal ahead of Hunt and the Mexican Jonathan Paredes .

Others

Orlando Duque, who speaks fluent English , is married and lives in Lāʻie in Oʻahu (Hawaii). The Colombian, who counts bodyboarding and canoeing among his hobbies, has been the subject of several documentary films . In 2005 he made his debut as an actor in the semi-autobiographical work 9 Dives , which premiered on April 19, 2006 at the Eurocine Colombia Festival in Bogotá . For the feature film by Austrian Mario Kreuzer , which was filmed within four years , Duque completed the highest cliff jump to date, from a 34 meter high bridge. 9 Dives was also successfully released in Venezuelan and Austrian cinemas in 2006.

Web links

• Official website for 9 Dives (English and Spanish)
• Portrait at funsporting.de

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Melanie Haack: With Tempo 90 into the abyss. In: The world. Welt.de, July 28, 2013, accessed December 9, 2019 . 
2. ↑ ^{a b} Portrait at redbullcliffdiving.com (English; accessed on August 4, 2013).