High diver James Lichtenstein finished second at the World Cup in Bahrain in September. In August, he beat the last two world champions to win his first Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series event. Not bad for a math guy from Illinois.
So far in 2024, American high diver James Lichtenstein made five podiums. He finished no worse than fifth place internationally. And his signature dive is a back quint.
That’s a lot of fives.
What are the odds his year would stack up like that?
Give him a pen and Lichtenstein could figure it out.
At Notre Dame University, he studied actuarial science, a branch of math that involves statistics and probability to assess risk. It’s mostly used in the finance and insurance fields, but Lichtenstein once used it to figure out whether his famous back quint dive was even possible.
“The math said it was – but who knows if the math is 100% correct? You hope it is,” he said, but the dive “also has to feel right.”
The back quint entails taking off with his back to the water and executing five somersaults in less than three seconds.
He used it in a 27m competition for the first time in 2021, at an event in Los Angeles. “Luckily, it felt right and the math made sense,” he said.
It also gave him legitimacy in the world if high diving.
“Once I did the back quint, people go, ‘Oh, this guy’s the real deal,’” he said.
Red Bull took notice, and invited him to compete in their Cliff Diving World Series in 2022.
“You’ve got to be doing something special to even get invited,” Lichtenstein said.
But even before his Red Bull debut, he said, “I was known for doing dives that no one else would do. For example, most people do their twists in the first flip and I was like, ‘I want to try it in the second flip.’”
Lichtenstein was also known for doing that in trampoline, his main sport while growing up in suburban Chicago.
“I never liked diving that much until I actually started getting good at it in college,” he admitted.
One reason he preferred trampoline, he said, is that “in trampoline, there’s nothing in your way. Versus in diving: you’re trying to get away from the board, but still also be close to the board. Then you’re doing flips in directions where you’re flipping back towards the board.”
But his love for learning new tricks was omnipresent.
Halfway through his first year at Notre Dame, he saw high diving for the first time and immediately knew he wanted to do it “because it gave more time in the air to do these crazy tricks and see what’s possible and still compete,” he said.
Two days after he graduated from Notre Dame, in 2017, he performed in his first show and started doing the back quint off a 20-meter tower at Holiday World & Splashin’ Safari in Santa Claus, Indiana.
“It was a good setup,” Lichtenstein recalled. “It had a solid tower and a deep enough pool. So it was a good place to train – and get paid to train. That’s how I saw it.”
These days, Lichtenstein trains on the 27m tower in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, which opened in 2022 and was touted as the first of its kind in the Western hemisphere. The first person to dive from 27m on that new tower was Lichtenstein’s current coach, 2017 world champion Steven LoBue.
That facility, Lichtenstein said, is a huge reason why he’s been so successful this year.
“If you’re training the height you compete from, you have an advantage over the rest of the world,” he said by phone from Florida six days before the World Aquatics World Cup finale in Brasilia, Brazil.
“Just having access to 27 meters,” he said, has made a crucial difference. “I can’t imagine not having the option to do anything higher than 10 meters until competition.”
The only other 27m facility in the world that’s open year-round is in China.
Which brings us to his stellar season.
Lichtenstein opened the year by placing fourth at the World Aquatics Championship in Doha, Qatar, in February by using his back quint (with a 5.3 degree of difficulty) and his harder optional dive, an armstand back 4 ½ (with 5.6DD).
Then, at the second Red Bull event of the year, in Boston, he finished second behind the 2024 world champion Aidan Heslop. Three weeks later at Polignano a Mare, Italy, he placed second again, this time behind the 2023 world champion Constantin Popovici. In July, he took third behind both men in Northern Ireland.
Then, on August 10 in Oslo, Lichtenstein claimed his first victory.
The winner was awarded a three-litre bottle of rose wine.
“That was nice,” Lichtenstein said. “I was surprised that it made it home in my suitcase.”
He followed the Oslo win by taking second place at the World Aquatics World Cup in Manama, Bahrain, in a contest so tight that the difference between first place Popovici and third place Heslop was only 4.20 points.
What will the Brasilia World Cup hold?
If Lichtenstein has calculated his odds of winning, he’s not telling. But one thing is certain. It will be his first trip to South America and he’s feeling no stress.
“It’s less pressure than Red Bull because there’s no series title to win,” he said.
Even so, the Brasilia World Cup is a qualifier for the 2025 World Aquatics championships in Singapore.
Lichtenstein’s second-place at the Bahrain World Cup in September put him in an excellent position to make the cut.
“I was slightly more relaxed [there] and not as worried about the outcome,” he said. “Maybe that helped me do better.”
Plus, it’s a point system – and points are just numbers.
“If you look at the math, he said, “I can get last place [in Brasilia] and still make it.”