Gary Hunt is one of those true characters in life's rich pagaent, the sort of adventurer whose motivation seems driven by answering challenges with a simple, "Why not?"

Those queries have led to the 40-year-old British native:

• moving to France
• regularly diving from nearly 90 feet in the air
• redefining the very way other human wild cards regularly dive from nearly 90 feet in the air
• becoming the best to ever dive from nearly 90 feet in the air
• acquiring French citizenship
• diving for France in synchronized 10m platform diving at the 2024 Paris Olympics

Read up on Hunt and you find a man of paradoxical ends, reasonable enough to eschew 10m diving because Tom Daley wasn't about to slip off the British podium yet also ambitious enough to become a 10-time cliff-diving champion.

A profile on Hunt from The Guardian in 2023 puts him in perspective. This "spectacularly absent-minded" man with no coach and no agent is a "daredevil who spends his free time gardening."

He trains with the intensity of a modern professional athlete, diving every weekday and spending hours in the gym, and relaxes like a sportsman of a bygone era, enjoying roll-up cigarettes in the evening and several drinks too many after a win.

So when people describe Hunt as the Messi, LeBron, or Ali of cliff diving, maybe they ought to look more to Babe Ruth and Johnny Unitas.

That, perhaps, is how someone has the swagger to enter an event, for their adopted home country, at an Olympics that particular country hosts, knowing full well there's only the smallest chance you do something that shows you belong on the stage.

And, in doing so, no one blinks when your synchronized diving turns out to be pretty darn unsynchronized (considering the level).

Cause why not, right Gary?