Every day, Darren Taylor stands in his front yard and stares up at a light pole. He spreads his arms and bends his waist, as if in a slow swan dive. Chin up, eyes on the light pole, arms wide and BAM!
He’s training for a world record. It’s the only way he trains.
He has already broken his world record twice. On May 18, in Madrid, Spain, he will go for his third. The Denver native will don an antique wrestling singlet and climb a tower to a small platform 35 feet off the ground, roughly the same height as the light pole and 5 inches higher than his last Guinness-approved attempt. Then he’ll dive into an inflatable kiddie pool with exactly 12 inches of water in it.
“It is the mother of all belly flops,” said the 45-year-old father and lifelong diver who answers to Professor Splash. “But if I don’t do it right, I’m going to get killed.”
In early January, Taylor earned his second Guinness world record for the “highest shallow dive” on live Italian television. He was nervous that night, and no one would look him in the eyes.
“They thought I was going to die,” he said. “I get that a lot.”
But he nailed it. As he always does.
Taylor started diving at age 4. By 10 he was competing. At 22, the North High School graduate was a pro diver with circus-like diving skills, sharpened from his tenure at Denver’s Casa Bonita restaurant and Elitch Gardens. Soon he was traveling the world as an entertainment diver, flipping from dizzying heights into 8-foot tanks.
He aimed for a shallow dive world record in May 2001. But the successful attempt, documented by The Denver Post, was disallowed because his 30-foot jump ended in an inflatable pool that was an inch deeper than Guinness regulations require for a shallow dive.
A terrible leg injury in the fall of 2001 forced him out of the Guinness game, but he came back in October 2005 with a 33-foot, 10-inch dive. That beat the 1979 record set by a Canadian doctor and delivered Taylor his first treasured world-record certificate. He upped the record to 34-5 in January. He’s going 35 feet, maybe more, this month. He thinks he could go 40. Sometime. Maybe.
Taylor, who almost hyperventilates when describing the up-and- down intricacies of his risky career, has developed his own technique for diving into shin-deep water. First and foremost: Never, ever look into the pool. When you’re staring up your body never breaks into a vertical dive and stays horizontal, he said.
“The biggest thing is not to peek,” he said. “It’s harder than you think.”
He leaps upward from the platform, a change from previous record holders who simply rocked forward into their dive. In the air, his chin juts skyward. Before impact, his outstretched arms come together to break the surface of the water. He almost always gets the breath knocked out of him.
It is a precise maneuver. The cost of flailing – catching a foot on takeoff, rotating forward or looking at the pool – is high.
After his Madrid jump next week, he’s moving into loftier realms. He’s negotiating with a television show to highlight another of his peculiar skills: diving while engulfed in flames. He’s trading the singlet for an Indy-racer’s fire suit and planning a 90-foot dive while doused in flaming petrol. He could go higher. The record, he says, for high diving is 176-10, demonstrating how a human must land to absorb the violent impact from that height.
“It’s scary,” he said. “I’m scared thinking about it right now. It hurts pretty bad, let me tell you. Really, it’s a train wreck. But my job is to scare people. That’s what I do.”
Learn more — Follow Taylor’s diving exploits at his website: www.professorsplash.com.
