Jamaica’s team captain at the Paris Olympic Games was not from track and field, a sport the country is known for, but from diving. Yona Knight-Wisdom is aiming to inspire the younger generation of his country to follow in his footsteps.

Yona Knight-Wisdom was the Caribbean island nation’s first ever male diver to make it to the Olympics when he qualified for the men’s three-metre springboard event in Rio eight years ago.

Born in England, Yona began diving in 2004 after being spotted through a talent-identification programme and became inspired while watching the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens.

As he struggled to break into the British team, he took the advice of his coach to represent one of his parents’ countries of birth and that decision in 2012, to don the colours of his father’s country, would change the course of his diving life.

He told Mersey Sport Live: “I realised that I had to take another path to finding success, because I was always going to struggle to beat the other guys in my group, and it sometimes felt even if I did, I might never get selected because they were tipped for the top much sooner than me. So, it was an easy decision because it gave me the opportunity to just do whatever I wanted, in terms of international diving.”

The top diver has represented Jamaica at three editions of the Games with his first participation in 2016. Since then he was determined to continue competing at Olympic level to prove that his early success was not just a coincidence, but the first building block in the foundation of his legacy.

He explained: “Making one Olympics was great, but it’s such a toss-up in that World Cup event, the fact that it’s just one day, it very much could have been a fluke.

“Tokyo became about proving to myself that Rio wasn’t just a fluke and proving to myself that I was actually good enough to compete at the Olympic level.

“Rio was about achieving my own goal, and Tokyo was proving that I could do it again. Then Paris became about the foundation of the legacy, so showing that it is possible to more people.”

That legacy did not stop with the Paris Olympics. Knight-Wisdom’s influence goes beyond his diving career thanks to his YKW Academy and an ambition to create a self-sustaining diving programme in Jamaica, a 10-day diving camp that had its second edition immediately after Paris. The YKW Academy offers young Jamaicans the same sporting opportunities that he received during his early career.

He admitted: “It was a process of thought over a few years. It started with my dad telling me that my representation wouldn’t be the only thing that I did. It had to have some kind of continual effect, I had to build a legacy.

“I’d really love to have a strong connection with Jamaica going forward, because the island gave me an amazing opportunity to achieve my dream. So, I would love to give back and provide the youth of Jamaica that same opportunity through sport.

“What I did in diving, hopefully will inspire more and more people not necessarily to try and be an elite diver, but just to try it, or at least learn how to swim. And I’d love to create the opportunities for that to happen more widely in the Caribbean and even worldwide, potentially.”

The two editions of the diving camp were a success despite low participation numbers, which still gave the former diver hope for a future diving community on the Caribbean Island.

“It was around 15 people that have been to each camp,” he said. “The most important thing is the enthusiasm in all of them being to the highest level.

“I’m sure that even though they haven’t continued diving, they’d still hopefully be talking about it and interested in the sport. So maybe, if there’s diving competitions in the future, they might choose to watch it, and choose to tell their friends, and then next year, when I do a camp, there might be more people that are interested in it, or the people that are involved in it are even more enthusiastic about it, and slowly, we can just build a community.”


This is not just a legacy focused on the new Caribbean generations, but also a reflection on how the cultural barrier of representation in aquatic sports can be overcome.

Knight-Wisdom said: “In Great Britain, they only had their first ever black swimmer at the Olympics in 2021. That’s unbelievable to say, so that shows that there’s a huge cultural barrier to aquatic sport, which I know people here are now trying to break down.

 “I think what would help that even further is, if countries that are dominated by black people started to produce high level athletes, then that would help to break the barrier down in other countries, such as Great Britain and Canada and America and so on.

“Because it will just diversify the field even more at the highest level. So, when young kids in those major countries are sitting watching the swimming at the Olympics or the diving at the Olympics, they’re seeing a more diverse range of backgrounds, and that’ll help to inspire them to maybe take it up.”

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