15 men and 8 women are gearing up to take to the 20m platform on the Pont de Bir-Hakeim bridge in the French capital for the start of the high diving competition at the European Aquatics Championships Paris 2026, which begin on 7 August and finish the following day.
Romania’s Constantin Popovici arrives as one of the men to beat. The Bucharest diver was voted the 2025 European Men’s High Diver of the Year after a season that included a bronze medal at the World Aquatics Championships in Singapore, and a runner-up finish in the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series, with 48 points to Gary Hunt’s title-winning 54.
Popovici, who won the inaugural European high diving title in Rome in 2022 before adding the world crown in Fukuoka the following year, has carried that form straight into 2026: he opened the World Series season with victory in Copenhagen and Mostar.
He also collected bronze at the second stop of the High Diving World Cup in Porto Flavia. One stop remains in the Red Bull Series, in Polignano a Mare on 27 September, where he still has a shot to climb further up the rankings. He arrives in Paris as one of the central stars, and he will have his eyes on the gold medal.
He will not have it easy, though. Spain’s Carlos Gimeno pushed Popovici and the rest of the world close in Singapore, taking silver behind USA’s James Lichtenstein after a stunning 143.10-point dive put him in control heading into the final round, and he finished third overall in the 2025 World Series on 46 points.
Italy’s Andrea Barnaba, who finished third in the European high diver of the year voting, and Romania’s Catalin-Petru Preda, who produced the highest-scoring dive of the entire Singapore final and also took the opening 2026 World Cup stop in Fort Lauderdale, add further strength in depth from the continent’s leading nations.
Gary Hunt will also be one to watch. The Frenchman, competing with the home crowd behind him, remains the most decorated diver in the sport’s history, with two world titles and a record haul of Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series crowns to his name.
Now representing France after his long career for Great Britain, the 42-year-old has shown consistently that he can still rise to the occasion, and a home crowd on the Seine will only sharpen his motivation as he chases the podium again after finishing fifth at Porto Flavia in July.
Germany’s Manuel Halbisch, Hungary’s Viktor Renato Dobra, Belgium’s Lander Roels, Denmark’s Frederik Brink Dalgaard and Switzerland’s trio of Matthias Appenzeller, Jean-David Duval and Pierrick Schafer complete a men’s field that stretches nine nations deep, while Neutral Athlete B Pavel Istomin, at 17 the youngest name on the entry list, will look to make an early mark on the senior stage.
In the women’s competition, the Netherlands’ Ginni van Katwijk heads into Paris as the reigning European high diver of the year after a 2025 season that made her Europe’s leading light on the global stage. Van Katwijk, 41, finished sixth at the World Championships in Singapore, the best result of any European diver.
Switzerland’s Morgane Herculano, runner-up in the same end-of-year voting, led the European charge in Porto Flavia last month with an eighth-place finish. A 23-time Swiss national champion on springboard before her switch to the tower, Herculano’s rapid progress since her 2024 high diving debut makes her one of the form athletes heading into the Championships, and she makes the journey to Paris with high aspirations.
Germany send a strong pair in Iris Schmidbauer, the 2022 European champion, who opened the 2026 High Diving World Cup season with victory at Fort Lauderdale, and Maike Halbisch, who at just 20 already holds the record for the hardest dive completed in a women’s competition after her 5.0 degree-of-difficulty leap at last year’s World Cup stop in Italy and has since made her Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series debut as a wildcard in the United States and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Also to watch are Italy’s Elisa Cosetti, a European bronze medallist in 2022 who has been a model of consistency ever since, and Ukraine’s Nelli Chukanivska, whose recent impressive performances at the World Series marked her out as one of the breakthrough performers of the European season. Denmark’s Annika Bornebusch completes a women’s field of eight.
High diving at the European Aquatics Championships Paris 2026 will take place on the River Seine from 7-8 August, with the first two rounds on the first day, and the final two rounds on the second.
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Stephen Stanley for European Aquatics
