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Why I dive on my birthday

Diver Cliff Devries had a promising career ahead when he was paralysed after surgery on a spinal cord tumour. Now he鈥檚 a diving coach and does a special birthday dive each year.

Cliff Devries was a talented young diver hoping to make the US Olympic team when he discovered he had a life threatening tumour on his spinal cord. He was given less than a year to live. He opted to try an experimental and risky surgery, and when he woke up he was paralysed from the neck down. But he realised that his diving training had prepared him for the gruelling recovery, and eventually enabled him to walk again, become a coach to new young divers and dive each year to celebrate his birthday.

Tito Quiroz used to wave up at the inmates of the prison next door to his university in Ensenada, Mexico, and they'd wave back from their cell windows. Then, one day, he got the opportunity to go inside to teach them his passion, the violin. He tells Outlook鈥檚 Clayton Conn about the audience he found behind those walls, and how one particular man used the music Tito shared with to turn his life around.

Picture: Cliff Devries on the diving board
Credit: ESPN

Available now

44 minutes

Last on

Wed 15 Apr 2020 03:06GMT

Broadcasts

  • Tue 14 Apr 2020 11:06GMT
  • Tue 14 Apr 2020 17:06GMT
  • Wed 15 Apr 2020 03:06GMT

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Podcast: Lives Less Ordinary

Podcast: Lives Less Ordinary

Step into someone else鈥檚 life and expect the unexpected