
Already this season, American high diver Kaylea Arnett has made five podiums in seven events – including a bronze medal at the World Aquatics High Diving World Cup in Bahrain three weeks ago. At 31, this is her first year competing on the 20m tower. Who is she and where did she come from?
Members of the indigenous Chickasaw nation often say their people are “unconquered and unconquerable.”
Kalyea Arnett embodies the slogan well.
Her energy is palpable on the phone. Her enthusiasm is contagious. And her spirit seems free when she’s about to dive from the 20-meter platform. After decades of diving indoors and a post-collegiate career performing in shows, she made her debut on the international high diving circuit this year and immediately became a consistent medal threat.
Six days before this weekend’s World Cup event in Brasilia, Brazil, she took a moment to share her story.
As a proud Chickasaw through her late mother’s lineage, Arnett was born in Texas and moved to the Chickasaw reservation in Oklahoma when she was about 7, along with her parents and two sisters.
A year later, an elementary school friend hosted a pool party. But it wasn’t just any pool. The place was huge – so big that it hosted all the aquatic events at the 1989 US Olympic Festival – a (now-defunct) domestic event that featured multiple Olympic sports. In addition to a 50m pool, the facility had multiple diving boards at 1-, 3-, 5-, 7-, and 10-meter heights.
It was located at the Oklahoma City Community College which, Arnett discovered, “just so happened to be in my backyard.”
At the party, Arnett started flipping off the diving board. A coach saw her, pulled her aside, and told her, “You need to be a diver.”
The first time she stood on the 10m platform, at age 9, she had no fear. She loved it. “I was so small and skinny that it was so easy to rip and make no splash,” she said.
When her coach convinced her to drop power tumbling and dive full time, Arnett said, “I was a little bit sad, but very excited to begin the diving journey.”
Later, when her family relocated to Texas, she trained at The Woodlands, the Houston facility where the 2000 Olympic gold medalist on 10m, Laura Wilkinson, had also trained. In fact, when Arnett was 17, Wilkinson un-retired and the two teamed up in 2010 for a 3m synchro exhibition at the US Nationals.
By the time Arnett graduated from high school in 2011, she was offered full diving scholarships at five US universities. She chose Virginia Tech and competed her bachelor’s degree in 2016 with a philosophy major and a minor in Japanese.
She has always been drawn to Japanese culture and would always introduce herself to the Japanese teams at junior international meets.
“They didn't speak English, but we still connected,” she said.
In addition to learning Japanese at Virginia Tech, Arnett spent a month living with a host family and studying in Kyoto. Her host mother hooked her up with the Kyoto dive team, too, so she could train.
High diving, however, didn’t enter her life until after college.
As she was finishing her fifth year at Virgina Tech, she faced the inevitable decision about what to do with her life. It was hard to make a career in philosophy, and she wasn’t ready to be done with diving.
When friends told her there was a show based in Macao that was hiring divers, Arnett immediately applied and got in.
The show was called “House of Dancing Water” and her fellow cast members included world-class divers Carlos Gimeno of Spain, two-time world championship medalist Catalin-Petru Preda of Romania, and Meili Carpenter of the US.
“This is where I really learned to high dive,” she said.
But the show was more than diving. “You have to learn how to put on makeup, learn how to count music and do choreography. We danced on a chandelier!” she said. “You have to be able to do a little bit of everything. It never got old, never got boring. Even though you were doing the same show every time, there was always something happening.”
Suddenly, Covid hit, and she left Macao and moved to Mexico where she and her Mexican husband, Alex, opened a coffee shop on a beach in Cancun.
In Mexico, she discovered diving in cenotes, natural sinkholes.
“I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, right in the backyard again!’ Diving has always found a way to find me,” she said.
She began training again, with the aim of being invited to join the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series.
In 2021, Red Bull offered her a wild card berth at an event in Bosnia, but two weeks before the competition, Cirque du Soleil offered her a contract to perform in the “O” show in Las Vegas.
Unable to do both, she picked “O,” where her fellow cast members included Bill May of the US, a world champion and male pioneer in artistic swimming.
A few years later, she was selected to represent the US at the 2024 World Aquatics Championships in Doha, Qatar. She finished an impressive fourth, the top American in the field.
Finally, three months later, at age 31, Arnett made her debut on the Red Bull circuit and immediately proved to be a podium threat. In the first three Red Bull events, she placed second behind the four-time world champion Rhiannan Iffland of Australia.
When she returned to the circuit in late August after letting a sprained medial collateral ligament heal in her right knee, she took third in Montreal and placed third again at the World Cup in Bahrain on September 22.
To call 2024 a breakthrough season would be an understatement. Arnett has made all but one podium on the highest level of high diving in the world.
Through it all, she’s become known for one particular dive: the reverse triple pike, which she debuted on June at the Red Bull stop in Boston. The degree of difficulty is 4.1, “but it feels like 4.9” she said.
“It's face forward, jump forward, but flip backwards. Everybody does it tuck,” she said. In pike, she added, “you have to use every ounce of your explosive muscle. I'm still kind of struggling to find out the take-off technique, because it's dangerous to get close to the platform. This has kind of been my issue.”
She knows she could choose a dive with a higher DD to earn more points, but explained that when coming up with a dive list, her strategy was “to pick the dives that I loved and was really comfortable with in traditional diving. I really love doing inwards and gainers [reverse dives]…inward 2½ pike, gainer 2½, so it made the most sense to do these dives, since I've done them so many times and they were my favorites.”
Still, she called it “very nerve wracking” doing the reverse triple pike for the first time.
“Some people said, ‘Why don't you just do a tuck first?’ I was like, ‘I don't do tucks.’ My tucks are very ugly. I don't spin very fast. I'm a pike diver.’ I have a long torso and short legs. I don't know if that has anything to do with it, but since I was very little, I've been very fortunate to be very flexible naturally. So my pikes are just much more aesthetic than my tucks.”
As for making five podiums in seven events so far this year, she says her success is a byproduct of diving consistently for 22 years.
“It's finally come to a point where I don't even have to think about what I'm doing. I trust my body and all the training that I've done for so many years, SO many hours in the pool. Now I can just let it happen naturally. The key for me, is to not overthink it.”
In contrast, in high school, she explained, “I put a lot of pressure on myself at competitions. I was so freaking nervous. But coming into competition as a 31-year-old this time, I told myself that I wasn’t going to put pressure on myself. So I listen to music. I dance to remind myself not to take it too seriously because when I do, it ends up backfiring.
“The key to my consistency this year,” she said, “It’s making sure that my mental[ity] is intact and that I’m relaxed.”