iStockphoto / Anna Draganova
Norway continues to be the world’s capital of Belly Flopping. It’s colloquially known as Dødsing in Norway and each year they hold the annual Death Diving World Championships where bellyfloppers with a death wish climb up the high dive and try to create the biggest splash without rupturing any of their internal organs, all with a sizable crowd watching on in the stands.
I’d kind of forgotten about the Death Diving World Championships aka the Dødsing Championships. I wrote about the 2016 championships when it popped up on my radar and I was in disbelief back then that nobody died.
Flash forward a couple of years and the divers are going harder than ever and it’s still blowing my mind that nobody’s gone unconscious in the water. Every now and then during the summers back in college, a friend and I would each crush a 12-pack of Natty Ice and the High Dive at the YMCA near his house….I DO NOT SUGGEST YOU DO THIS. THis is me saying ‘don’t do this at home’. It’s just my story.
The beer took away all of the fear of hurting yourself on the High Dive and we’d try and time it to be there in the afternoons so the local YMCA diving team would be holding practice and we could drunkenly try to mirror their dives. And I learned firsthand how f’n badly it hurts when you mess up a drive and smack your stomach or head flat on the water…These divers in Norway are doing this intentionally and it is next-level crazy.
There are two clips here you need to see. One is a full rundown of the winning diver’s bellyflops from the 2019 Death Diving World Championships in Norway. Diver Kim Andre Knutsen edged out 2-time World Champion Truls Torp by 0.5 points and he just barely beat 3-time world champ Filip Julius Devor.
The competition was stiff. The second clip is a recap of the 10 best dives from the 2019 Dødsing World Championships. Let’s check ’em out.
Here are Kim Andre Knutsen’s winning dives, the new world champion:
How they’re not in a hospital is beyond me. And why Norwegians choose to do this when their Summer is so short is beyond me when they could be leisurely chilling in the water or drinking in the pool instead of trying to explode their stomachs.
Now, here is a recap of the top-10 best dives from the Death Diving/Dødsing World Championships. The best of the best.
I don’t even want to bellyflop from flat ground. Just running and jumped into the pool with a splayed out bellyflop is more pain than I prefer to endure in the pool.
I’m not one of those lazy types that want to sit around and float in the pool all day, I’d just prefer a good ol’ can opener/jackknife or freestyle dive to an excruciating bellyflop. I don’t understand the glory in this sport but I’m not Norwegian so I guess I don’t need to.
For highlights from previous year’s Death Diving Bellyflop World Championships you can follow that link!