One Breath

by Adam Skolnick

  Before he’d hopped the boat to the competition zone, he talked about diving with a small lung squeeze. “With the experience I’ve had, and what I’ve seen, you’d think I’d be very cautious.” Yet even though his team had no chance of winning, he couldn’t stay out of the water. “The attraction is the competition, the athletic accomplishment,” he explained, “because there is nothing that nice about doing a competition dive until you’re coming up with a tag in your hand.”

  He wasn’t the only diver to check his palm that day. Kerry Hollowell was in Sardinia leading Team USA. On the men’s side were Steve; Kyle Gion, a gifted twenty-year-old Brown University student from Honolulu who held the American record in Dynamic; and Kurt Chambers, a freedive instructor and photographer from Kona who coined his own hashtag: #girlsgonefreediving, which he posts along with shameless booty shots of beautiful ladies in g-strings and monofins on his Instagram account (@chambersbelow, for the curious). In 2015 Kurt would break the American record in Free Immersion. Ashleigh Baird, an architect turned dive bum from Florida, and Mandy Sumner, a Honolulu geologist, rounded out the women’s team.

  After hemming and hawing for weeks, Ashley Chapman decided not to represent Team USA. She didn’t think they had a chance of winning a medal, and she and Ren were too busy fixing up their new boat and raising Ani to uproot for a month of training and competition. Francesca Koe Owings, Team USA’s coach and lead organizer, couldn’t make it either.

  Kerry could have used their support. She’d had a miserable week. She and Steve had split up on the flight over after a long training camp in Kona, and the breakup rocked her world. Her mind was scrambled as she struggled to fill the Team USA leadership void. Even her training was shit. Worse, she’d suffered a minor lung squeeze a week before the competition. Still, the American women were hanging tough in fourth place, with an outside shot at bronze, when Kerry clipped onto the line. She made a strong dive to 60 meters, flashed the tag and completed a clean protocol after surfacing. As she swam over to the oxygen bottle to recover, she felt relieved for the first time in weeks. Sitting on the bow of the dry boat, she breathed deep, and enjoyed the pure healing of 100 percent oxygen and the nourishing view of the Sardinian coastline shining in the sun. Then she coughed twice and spit into her palm. Blood.

  The event physician in Sardinia was Diego Olivari, an ER doc with a master’s in hyperbaric medicine. Big as a bear, with an ever-present smile, he was also an avid scuba diver, and while in the area for the competition, he started taking freediving classes. Unlike doctors at other events, when an athlete blacked out in Sardinia, he didn’t wait for the safety divers to bring them around. He’d pounce and blast a shot of 100 percent oxygen into their mouth from a tank he slung over one shoulder.

  Kerry had discussed Nick’s case with Olivari, as doctors do, and he came in with an understanding of freedive physiology. She also showed him the blood in her palm. “It looks dry,” he said. “It’s an old injury. It isn’t fresh.” Kerry agreed, and if they were right, it meant she didn’t reinjure herself on the dive, but that she still had remnants of her minor squeeze the week before rattling around her lungs.

  Mike Board felt something new had happened on his dive, so he made an appointment with Olivari later that day to have an ultrasound done, partly out of concern, but also out of curiosity. Up until then, event doctors had been using a stethoscope to listen to the lungs and determine if the diver was squeezed, but Olivari believed he could detect edema with ultrasound. He met Mike in his de facto exam area: an empty banquet room on the fourth floor of the hotel. Mike removed his shirt, and Olivari scanned his chest with a transducer to take a sonic picture of his lungs.

  On the shadowy image, it looked like rays of light were streaming down, which Olivari called a ULC, or underwater lung comet. ULCs, he said, are caused by blood, which is blocking the light from his transducer. “You have a little edema,” he told Mike. “This is the first symptom of a serious injury for the lung, but it’s not bad. Just a little bit.” For an injury like Mike’s, Olivari said that breathing 100 percent oxygen, 5 meters underwater, would dry up the edema in ten minutes. He sent Mike to the pool.

  He went on to explain that while ultrasound could also reveal a large rupture in the lung, smaller tears would be impossible to detect. Unfortunately, even major squeeze events during a freediving competition are believed to cause only small wounds, and it was a series of such injuries, Kerry had begun to suspect, that may have led to Nick’s death. In other words, Olivari’s innovation was exciting, because at least there was a way to detect edema, but his diagnosis was also incomplete. There was no way of knowing based on Mike’s ultrasound if, or how badly, his tissue had been damaged.

  Mike was happy to have at least some confirmation that he had been only slightly squeezed, and the next day, another ultrasound showed his lungs were clear. When it came to Nick, however, Mike was still in the dark and he was growing frustrated with AIDA, which had initially blamed Nick’s death on his reckless diving history and followed that up with nothing at all. Nearly a year after his death, athletes were still diving blind. Yes, new rules had been voted on, but they wouldn’t be implemented until January 2015, so in the wake of the sport’s biggest tragedy, nothing had changed.

  Much of that lack of responsiveness comes down to time and money. AIDA’s eleven board members are all volunteers, most with demanding, full-time jobs, and it’s as disparate an organization as one can find. AIDA is a federation, made up of thirty-five national freediving associations that form a General Assembly. Any individual who belongs to one of the national associations can nominate a rule change or board member, and the General Assembly votes on the rule or candidate in question—one country, one vote. The board is elected every two years, and meets via Skype once a month, while rule changes are put up for a vote as suggestions arise throughout the year. The only time everyone is in the same room at the same time is during world championship events, when the General Assembly meets. But Eurocentric AIDA isn’t just the governing body of a sport. It is also a certifying organization that puts out freediving curriculum and certifies recreational freedivers and instructors, placing them in direct competition with many of its members.

  Put it all together and you have a multicultural organization staffed with mostly well-meaning folks dedicated to their sport, but one with built-in blind spots, thought gaps, and conflicts of interest. Over its nearly quarter century in operation there has been a ballot box–stuffing scandal, and an embezzlement of over 200,000 Swiss francs by the organization’s treasurer and former president. Yet despite competitive freediving’s inherent risk, AIDA had never been confronted with an athlete’s death until Nick’s, and, to some athletes, the organization’s response was underwhelming.

  “Last month in Kalamata there was an athlete getting squeezed repeatedly, but because the rules hadn’t changed, the doctor did not disqualify him,” Mike said. In the end Mike and photographer Daan Verhoeven, another witness to Nick’s death, convinced him to stop diving. “But the fact is he didn’t have the knowledge to make that decision himself, so I’m a little upset that I’m having to chase around for information nearly a year later.”

  Mike didn’t know that Kerry, who also had an ultrasound done by Olivari that showed no edema at all, had spent the past ten months meeting with dive doctors and consulting with emergency medical professionals. She was even working with a forensic pathologist at East Carolina University on a secondary autopsy that she hoped would reveal what happened to Nick, once and for all. What she would soon find would provide needed clarity, and just might change the sport.

  The final competition day at team worlds was held at the Hotel Setar pool, which is dug into its concrete pad overlooking the Mediterranean. The 25-meter pool was corded off into two competition lanes, one on either end, with empty lanes between. A gentle breeze billowed a banner plastered with the face of Umberto Pelizzari, the freediving legend and national hero, who was hawking Omer freediving computers, an
d the national flags from all the competing countries, which were draped from the railing of the hotel’s painfully average restaurant.

  The athletes gathered on a patch of lawn, where they suited up and relaxed as they awaited their top times. Goran Colak was still steaming about his countryman’s slipup in the open water. “If we all just did 75 meters, we would have been so far ahead of everybody we could have had one of our guys not dive today,” he said. “But he did 95 meters the day before and he wasn’t even breathing hard. I’d seen him do 100 meters, so I said, okay, do 92. Actually, it was my fault. I should have known better. This was his first big competition, and it was just nerves, I guess. The Russians gave us a gift and we gave it back with interest.”

  Still, Croatia was very much in contention, and if Goran could pull off a swim close to his personal best, which was the world record, they might eke out another gold. Going into the final day, Croatia was in second place, eight points behind Denmark and eighteen points ahead of Russia, but Denmark wasn’t as strong in the pool and they would need their rivals to earn a couple of red cards to hold them off.

  While in the depth competition athletes earned one point per meter; in the pool they earned one point for every two meters. In other words, Croatia had a 36-meter head start on Russia when Goran slipped into liquid, slow and calm, and clipped his neck weight into place. In Dynamic, athletes must stay beneath the surface, and the only way to do that without fighting buoyancy is to be weighted. He stretched his left arm overhead, then his right, loosening up, his eyes focused into the light blue water. All around the pool, more than a hundred spectators gathered close to watch the world’s best at work.

  He sipped and packed air audibly, dipped below, and pushed off. His long, elegant dolphin kicks were calm and rhythmic. Kick, glide, kick, glide. A safety diver on a kickboard trailed him the whole way. In Dynamic, suspense sets in as the athlete closes in on his or her limit, and by the time Goran touched the end of the pool after 200 meters the entire gallery was fixated, everyone standing yet perfectly silent, as if on the eighteenth green of the Masters. He touched the wall at 225 meters and turned again. How long would he go, how far could he push? One more lap. When he reached 250 meters he came up suddenly. A crush of photographers and judges formed a tight semicircle to watch Goran ace the protocol. Croatia was back in gold medal position.

  Alexey was one of the few not to pay attention to Goran’s dive because he was preparing for his own in one of the warm-up lanes. As Goran smiled and shook hands on the pool deck, Alexey, this time dressed in a clean black wetsuit, with no sponsors or Team Russia logos, was ready to go. Calm as a bodhisattva, he breathed up facing forward, his eyes closed, his yellow nose clip locked in place. With ten seconds to go he took his peak inhalation, packed more air on top of that, secured his neck weight, and kicked away, gliding through the blue, smooth as butter.

  His technique was slightly different. He did a double dolphin kick before his glide, which was a beat longer than Goran’s. That’s how he learned to do it as a young gun fin swimmer in St. Petersburg, and he hadn’t changed. Goran stood on the side of the pool watching, as Alexey tapped to 200 meters, his form still holding. Could he pass Goran’s 250 meters and gain points? If so, Russia would be in terrific position. Alexey turned at 225 meters, but couldn’t hold out much longer. He came up and leaned his elbows on the side of the pool at 234 meters. Hypoxic, his protocol was wobbly, and he could barely choke out those three important words, “I am okay,” as the judges leaned in and the cameras clicked. But it was clean enough for a white card. Russia was now in second place, twenty-six points, or 52 meters, behind Croatia.

  Alexey climbed out of the pool to accept congratulations from Goran. Coming into the competition, these were the two men everybody wanted to see. Goran had been dominant in the pool for years, but his obligations frequently precluded him from entering depth competitions, something he wanted to do more frequently. Already a 100-meter diver, with his breath hold it stood to reason that should he decide to focus on depth, he could be one of the world’s best. As it was, he and Alexey, who rarely enters pool competitions, seldom compete against one another unless they’re in Dubai holding their breath for pink slips. And like many world-class athletes, they appreciated this opportunity to go head to head, and talk some trash.

  “I beat you,” Goran said. He’d been tallying his and Alexey’s points, hoping to edge out his friend for unofficial, man of the comp honors. Two years ago, when Croatia won gold, Alexey won their head to head. “I needed 9 meters and I got 16, so I beat you by 3½ points.”

  “But my Static doesn’t count, it was shit,” griped Alexey.

  “Yeah, like my depth counts. I can do 102 meters. I was taking it easy.”

  “I was taking it super easy.”

  “Yeah, I saw how easy you were taking it,” Goran snarked, referencing Alexey’s difficult protocol. Alexey shook it off, but it didn’t end there.

  “If both of your guys do 200 and both my guys do 230, that will be fun,” Alexey said.

  “Yes, but they need to do 230.”

  “They can do 260.”

  “You can do 268,” Goran said.

  Point Goran, but bragging rights would only go to the gold medalists, and Sasha was diving next. After fumbling his Static dive, he’d kept Marianna at a distance, and his focus was on the competition. Russia’s best man in the pool, he was dressed in an all-red bodysuit, his neck weight wrapped in duct tape. Favoring a simple one kick, glide rhythm like Goran, he moved more quickly than the others. Of course, in this distance race, slower can be better if it means a more efficient use of oxygen. Still, he got to 225 meters with nary a ripple in form, and as he closed in on 250, he came close to the side, rising just before he hit the wall. His protocol was perfect. He wasn’t even breathing hard after swimming 247 meters on one breath.

  “That’s why he’s on the team,” said Marina, who ran to congratulate him. Alexey gave him a bear hug, then rushed over to Goran to goose him a bit. After clawing back from a nightmare start, Sasha had moved the Russian men into first place. Goran could offer only a thin smile. It was going to be close.

  Andrey, Russia’s last man in the water, needed 213 meters to get to the magic 460 number Alexey thought would win gold. He came close, clocking in with a dive of 209 meters, which put Russia in the clubhouse with 802 points. Goran’s guys would need to swim a collective 404 meters to catch them.

  Bruno was the first to go, and like Sasha, he craved redemption. Goran knelt beside him as he breathed up, whispering last-minute tips and helping him relax. Anything over 210 meters would put them in a terrific position, but Bruno didn’t look relaxed at all. He looked intense, and after just a few packs, he pushed off with a dodgy entry, splashing Goran in the face with his monofin. He kicked with force and his glide was smooth, but his speed picked up as he approached 175 meters, as if he were fighting to get to 200. When he got there he blew right past it, rising at 215 meters and delivering a clean protocol. The swim was strong but he received a yellow card and a 10-meter penalty for piercing the surface with his fin in the middle of the pool.

  With the penalty, Croatia’s last man, Bozidar Potani, needed a 200-meter swim to win gold. The shortest of the three men on the squad, his head was shaved smooth, and he exhaled audibly, hoping to bubble off all the pressure and deliver one more clean dive for his country. He could not. His form was solid until he hit 150 meters, then things went wobbly. He’d been too slow, perhaps attempting to relax too much, and never found his sweet spot, that perfect balance where speed and relaxation meet and oxygen efficiency peaks. He slowed down even more as he approached the 175-meter turn but couldn’t make it that far. He moved to the side of the pool, in trouble. His arms buckled as he attempted to lift his head out of the water. He tried to rise up again, and again he buckled, his chin nearly bashing the pool ledge. His eyes were open but he wasn’t all there. The judges called that a mechanical blackout, and he received a red card. The Russian men w
on gold, and the Russian women were in prime position to make it a double.

  Russia’s gold-suited women had been the best in every discipline, though Team Japan wasn’t far behind. In the weeks before the comp, Marina had been heartbroken, trying to piece her life back together. She’d even thought of quitting freediving altogether. Then just before coming to Sardinia she booked a job as an underwater stunt double on Point Break 2, shooting scenes in Tahiti with champion big wave surfer Mark Healey, who’s also a terrific spearfisherman. That gig reignited her love for freediving, and every one of her dives in Sardinia had been so enjoyable, she wasn’t leaving the sport anytime soon. Her Dynamic swim of 205 meters was elegant, and better than any American man has ever achieved. As she got out of the pool she was surrounded by photographers, a position she’s quite used to. She indulged them as long as they clicked.

  Geeky cute, Marianna, with her thick ringlets of strawberry-blonde hair and rosy cheeks, also had a roller-coaster ride in Sardinia. She knew Sasha was spoken for when they started hooking up in Croatia, but she thought she’d fallen for him. Thanks to her iron will, she didn’t let heartbreak follow her into the water, and she glided to an easy 155-meter white card.

  Natalia, of course, stole the show. Thanks to her teammates, when she slipped into the water, she needed to swim just 30 meters on one breath to defeat the Japanese and win gold, but she had other plans. With a crowd rapt in anticipation, in a country that reveres its freediving stars, Natalia began to glide beneath the surface, using the double kick technique, same as her son. After four laps and 100 meters, everybody assumed she’d rise and claim Russian gold at any moment, but she kept swimming.