With the 2025 international diving season complete and a new year on the horizon, World Aquatics celebrates the sport’s standout performers with the Athletes of the Year Awards, honouring the divers who defined the season.
Coming into 2025, the Chinese diving team stood atop the sport after achieving what no country had ever done in Olympic history — sweeping all eight diving gold medals at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.
The new season didn’t quite follow that same script. With stunning comebacks and fresh challengers emerging — particularly at the World Aquatics Championships – Singapore 2025 — China’s divers faced tougher competition. Even so, they once again topped the diving medal table, collecting nine gold, three silver, and four bronze medals.
Perhaps nowhere is China’s grip on excellence more apparent than in the women’s 10m platform, where the duo of Chen Yuxi and Quan Hongchan — known as the Magicians of Splash for their disappearing technique and near-rippleless entries — continue to set the global standard from the diving tower.
In 2025, Chen found yet another performance level. The Shanghai native went a perfect seven-for-seven across the 2025 Diving World Cup circuit, including three victories — Women’s 10m Platform, Women’s 10m Synchronised, and Mixed 3m & 10m Team — at the Super Final in Beijing.
The golden treble was hardly routine, as Chen explained immediately after her performance in the iconic Water Cube.
"I have never tried before like this -- three big battles within two days from 10m synchro, mixed team and today's individual event,” Chen said. “I felt faint at last and wordless right now. It is a huge challenge facing the new competition format, especially learning how to relax and adjust myself in between. I tried hard to focus on my dives and am super satisfied with my performance."
The 20-year-old carried that momentum into the 2025 World Championships in Singapore, claiming another trio of global titles — Women’s 10m Platform, Women’s 10m Synchronised, and Mixed 3m & 10m Team — bringing her career total to nine world championship golds, along with the silver she earned in the Women’s 10m Platform at Doha 2024.
If there was one performance that stood above the rest in a season full of highlights, it came during the Women’s 10m Platform Final at the OCBC Aquatic Centre, when the six-dive score of 430 flashed on the World Championship scoreboard.
“When I saw the score, I was in disbelief,” Chen said. “It’s not easy to score 430. Before the competition, I didn’t expect to be able to get this score.”
But it didn’t come easy. “There’s always pressure,” Chen remarked. “If you say there’s no pressure before a competition, then that’s not normal. It’s about how you transform that pressure into motivation.”
It also took a team. The two-time Olympic gold medallist in the Women’s 10m Synchro event and double Olympic silver medallist in the Women’s 10m Platform said she left the Paris 2024 Olympics “a little shaken” and that it took some months to return to her best form. “I have to thank my teammates and coaches for their support and encouragement so that I could perform the way I did.”
While Chen Yuxi’s season reflected the sustained dominance of Chinese diving, the men’s side of the sport told a different story. There, Australia’s Cassiel Rousseau re-emerged as the defining force of 2025 at the Singapore Worlds.
For Rousseau, 2025 marked a return to the top of the global rostrum. In 2023, the former acrobatic gymnast stunned the world by winning the 10m Platform world title in Fukuoka, Japan — a performance that snapped China’s six-year unbeaten streak at the World Championships and earned him the 2023 Male Diving Athlete of the Year honour.
Twenty-twenty-five will go down as another vintage Rousseau season, as the now 24-year-old dove out of his mind on Sunday to close the 2025 World Aquatics Championships in Singapore.
Trading in his trademark long, flowing locks for a short-cropped cut, Rousseau was all business on the final night of the 2025 Worlds.
For the first four rounds, Rousseau and China’s Zhu Zifeng traded leads. Beneath the surface, though, a subplot was emerging: four different divers topped the scoring in each of the first four rounds, each clearing 89 points — Rousseau in round one, Zhu in round two, 14-year-old Zhao Renjie of China in round three, and Japan’s 2022 silver medallist Rikuto Tamai, 18, in round four. Only one of these four would make the podium, as there was no room for inconsistency in the Men’s 10m Platform Final.
Heading into the final round, Rousseau led narrowly ahead of Oleksii Sereda of Ukraine and Randal Willars Valdez of Mexico.
Willars Valdez led off the main podium contenders with a forward 4½ pike carrying a 4.1 DD — by far the most difficult dive of the night — and scored 98.40.
Sereda followed with a back 2½ with 2½ twists pike, scoring 91.80 to take the lead.
Rousseau was up next. “When I saw Oleksii [Sereda] nail his last dive, I was just thinking, ‘What the f***.’ Like, why did he have to do that? Because now I have to go above and beyond,” Rousseau recalled following the final.
Rousseau was a man for the moment, ripping his forward 4½ for a final-dive score of 99.90 and a personal-best total of 534.80 points — enough to secure his second world title.
In the Mixed Zone, Rousseau said that after winning his first world title in 2023, “Last year wasn’t fun at all. I had a pretty bad year in life and in diving, but coming into this year, I’ve been having a lot more fun and I’ve been a lot more motivated. Even if I didn’t come first today, that fun would have still carried across. This medal just tops it.”
Now the Brisbane native is a two-time World Aquatics Male Diving Athlete of the Year to complement his two individual world titles, with both Chen and Rousseau receiving a USD 10,000 monetary prize alongside their crystal globes.