There were other similarities too. Neither diver was afraid of taking big jumps during training—an oft-criticized tactic—and both were squeezed in Kalamata at the Individual Depth World Championship where Johnny became close to his countryman, Will Trubridge. Johnny won bronze in Free Immersion, with an impressive dive to 95 meters, but upon surfacing coughed up bright red oxygenated blood. As October days passed, however, neither appeared to be injured. Training with each other along with Will almost daily, both Johnny and Nick had the same goal for the competition: an overall bronze medal.
“From the first time I saw his name, when he’d hit 91 meters, I knew we were on a collision course,” Johnny said. Nick felt the same way, and they even joked about it as they trained together. Nick knew something else, too; if he managed to win bronze, the depths required would mean he’d have bagged those two American records he wanted so badly.
Secretly, though, Nick was exhausted. Even minor physical effort left him gassed. On dives, he’d have an urge to breathe at 20 meters, which was not like him. It was as if his superpower had betrayed him. Nick was supposed to be the guy who could tolerate pain and discomfort better than anyone, and now his body was rejecting the very thing that made him special. These were telltale signs of an overtrained athlete. Overtraining leads to performance black holes and the only way to get back on track is to rest, which allows the muscles to rehydrate and repair. What he needed was a break.
His days would brighten during the last week of October when Johnny and Nick embraced Movember tradition, growing delightfully revolting mustaches to raise awareness for prostate cancer, and when Vanessa Weinberg flew into Deadman’s Cay. Nick and Vanessa had been messaging, Skyping, and talking over the phone since they’d met in Los Angeles the previous April. They talked about training and yoga, philosophy and family. He gave her tips on how to find a monofin. She gave him pranayama exercises to help him relax. They shared snapshots from her road trips and his travels. They flirted. They analyzed their dreams. When she snagged a small role on a network comedy, he cheered her on. When he was at a competition, she helped settle him down beforehand and checked in afterward to see how it went.
There was a one-month period when Nick wasn’t in contact. It coincided with his trip to Croatia. He resurfaced while still in a funk over losing Bojana. “I’m a bit of a mess,” he wrote. “Didn’t get what I wanted in Croatia.” As the weeks wore on and the pain began to recede, Vanessa was eager to hear from him, and extended only positive vibes. Bojana hit with the force of a hurricane; Vanessa delivered sunshine. Part of him wondered about her since the spring, but she lived three thousand miles away from a home he rarely lived in. Suffering from a broken heart, he also wondered if she wasn’t just another sweet illusion.
Vanessa grew up in Los Angeles. She was a California girl who moved back east for school and was into yoga and theater. Tall and athletic, she had long blonde hair, blue eyes, and Eastern European roots, and she was poetry in the pool. But she’d been unlucky in love. Forty and unmarried, she wondered if she’d ever find her soul mate. Nick ticked a lot of boxes for her. He was handsome and strong, kind-hearted, fun, and adventurous, and on the day they met, she had an intuition that he would become an important part of her life. For months she went about her chores, teaching yoga and auditioning for bit parts on big-time TV shows, or for major roles in small films, and messaged him only because she wanted to. Because it felt good to connect with a good man. She was optimistic yet realistic.
Days after winning his silver medal, while still in Kalamata, he invited her to join him for Vertical Blue. Instead, she arrived a bit earlier, which was perfect. Most of the athletes wouldn’t show until the day she left on November 5. She and Nick would have nine days with minimal distraction, enough time to figure out what they were.
After a day of training, and on Vanessa’s first evening on Long Island, he took her to the St. Peter and St. Paul Catholic Church. Long Island has dark nights, and the starry sky was patched with clouds, which were being chased by wind from one horizon to the other. He led her into the sanctuary and up one of the twin bell towers. The ladders were rickety, the passage cramped enough that they had to tuck their shoulders to squeak through. She was timid. He helped her feel safe, and they emerged onto a thin wraparound lookout platform with the best views on the island. It was misty, and they huddled close. When she arrived the night before, they’d slept in separate beds. That night, in the wee hours, she climbed in bed beside him.
They didn’t kiss until a few days later when Will and his wife, Brittany, threw a Halloween party for the athletes and safety divers who had already arrived. He and Vanessa danced throughout the night. When they got home he kissed her for the first time. They climbed into bed, kissing and touching, until she stopped him. She was falling for him, and she needed to know that they had a chance, and weren’t just a fling.
“What are you looking for in a partner?” she asked.
“Well,” he said, rolling onto his back. She laid her head in the crook of his arm. “I really want to date somebody that lives close enough I can make them chicken soup when they’re sick.”
“I want you to make me chicken soup when I’m sick,” she laughed as he ran his fingers through her hair. She understood his point. They were long distance. The odds were not in their favor. “God! I have such bad luck in love!” she shouted. He leaned on his elbow and looked into her eyes.
“If that’s true, then so do I,” he said, and kissed her again. This time she didn’t stop him. Soon they were naked and he took his time as he explored every inch of her. He was having so much fun he started squirming.
“You’re like a dolphin doing a happy dance,” she said, laughing. He nodded. “I’m being intimate with a dolphin.” They didn’t have sex. She made him wait for that, but they went everywhere else.
On November 4, the day before Vanessa left the island, Nick hit 70 meters in Constant No Fins, a new personal best, and it was super clean. For weeks, Will had been diving alongside Johnny and Nick to watch their form and coach them up, and he knew that Nick had been moored on a plateau. This was a major breakthrough. Vanessa had been off to the side watching. He swam over to her.
“Are my lips blue?” he asked. “Do I look okay?”
“You’re fine. Your lips aren’t blue at all,” she said, giddy. Vanessa had come to Long Island, brightened Nick’s world, and it was starting to show where it counted most. Underwater.
Athletes, photographers, and safety divers arrived every day in the lead-up to Vertical Blue. Among them was Dr. Barbara Jeschke. Will had met Jeschke, also a competitive freediver, during Team Worlds in 2012, where she was the lead physician. The event website that year included a profile of Jeschke, and on that page was her personal statement about her qualifications and her role in that competition:
I know about emergency medicine, and, being an athlete myself, I know about the risks freediving can bring. So, in case of need, I will give my very best to help! But deep in my heart I hope that nobody will really need me during this World Championship ;-)
Forget for a second that an emoticon in a doctor’s bio is never a good sign, and that statement is still troubling. It reads lighthearted and far too casual given her role in a sport where athletes push the very limits of their physiology.
Before Nick died, there was a feeling among athletes that doctors who knew the sport well or, better yet, were freedivers themselves were ideal candidates to work competitions because they knew the health risks best. There are good examples of freediver docs. John Shedd, a freediver and an ER doc for twenty-five years, is the long-tenured event physician for Deja Blue and runs arguably the most thorough safety program in the sport. Each year he brings a full emergency kit with him when he arrives on location.
Jeschke, on the other hand, arrived on Long Island empty handed. She’d expected Will to have the necessary gear waiting for her. The ER docs and emergency professionals interviewed for this book found that expectation mind
-boggling. Doctors headed to a remote island prepared to lead an emergency response team, they reasoned, should always bring their own medical kit and be prepared for the worst-case scenario at all times. Jeschke’s preparation level hinted that she wasn’t sufficiently on guard and perhaps, as a freediver herself, was so familiar with the perceived risks inherent in the sport that she’d gotten comfortable. In other words, just like the athletes, she assumed competitive freediving was perfectly safe.
When Dr. Jeschke arrived to find Will’s medical gear incomplete, she swung into action. She recruited Joe Knight, one of Ren’s safeties and a former paramedic from Byron Bay, Australia, to help her scavenge medical supplies. “Barbara and I ran around the whole island trying to find gear. It was cannibalized from so many different areas,” Joe said. “If the doctor had come in [with her own kit] and said, this is my kit and I’m super happy with it and nobody fucks with it, I think that would have been better.”
Vanessa left the island on November 5. That morning, Nick rose early, made her breakfast and cracked two fresh coconuts. He drove her to Deadman’s Cay airport where they found a bench and some shade, held hands and waited for her plane to arrive from Nassau. They made plans to meet up in New York, and again during his and Goran’s upcoming cross-country freediving tour.
When her plane finally landed, Vanessa felt a twinge in her heart. A handful of freedivers—new arrivals, including photographer Daan Verhoeven, disembarked and gathered around the alfresco baggage claim area. They waved and smiled at Nick as he and Vanessa began walking toward the prop plane idling on the runway. On the tarmac he pulled her close, and kissed her deeply. And again. His heart seemed to be healing along with his body. With the competition five days away, he simply had to repeat the dives he had done in training and the records were his for the taking. He would open with a dive to 72 meters without fins.
He failed on his first attempt, losing his mouthfill and turning early at 60 meters, so he made the same announcement the following day. When he failed again, he was furious. This time he had technical problems. The strap for his lamp, which divers wear around their forehead so they can see at depth, broke and he lost his light. His computer malfunctioned as well, so his alarms never sounded. He had to guess when to call up his mouthfill from his lungs and had no idea how far he was from the plate. When he got to 69 meters he couldn’t equalize any further so he swam back to the surface. Instead of running through the surface protocol to earn a yellow card this time, he threw a tantrum and stormed off. Johnny didn’t go to the hole that morning. It was an off day for him, so when Nick came back he asked him how it went. Nick grabbed the balcony railing, shook it, and screamed, “Seventy-two fucking meters!”
“He really shook the fuck out of it,” Johnny said. “He almost ripped it off.” That night he messaged Vanessa on Facebook, and told her he’d been feeling pressure in his lungs beyond 15 meters. That’s the kind of thing beginning freedivers experience, not competitors at the top of their game.
Nick: I don’t want to compete any more this season. It all feels so awful that I can’t relax. I want to do well and I think that is where the pressure is coming from.
Vanessa: I certainly understand the wanting to do well part…I think we all know that you will get it soon….Try to take the pressure off yourself and re-find the joy in diving.
Nick: Tomorrow I am going to train early in the morning maybe do a CWT dive and then go spear fishing.
—
NICK HAD TWO off days in a row to rest and Vanessa tried to convince him to actually rest. Johnny did too. “For me he was in a state of overtraining,” said Johnny. “A rest day is a proper rest.” Nick wasn’t hearing it. The next afternoon, after training in the blue hole, he grabbed a kayak and paddled out to the barrier islands from the beach below his house looking for lobster. A specific, monster-sized lobster he’d seen out there twice before, but had always eluded him. This time he didn’t give up. He chased it into a crack and spent nearly half an hour waiting for a clean shot, finally spearing it with his Hawaiian sling. He’d never seen a lobster that big, and couldn’t wait to tell his Uncle Paul and the Bonzo boys all about it. He thought about what he’d say on the long paddle back to the beach where he rejoiced and posed for pictures with his eight-pound prize on the sand. It would be his final victory.
Nick was back on the line two days later, going for a national record in Free Immersion with a dive of 95 meters. An 88-meter dive would have been enough to earn the record, and after coming up short twice in Constant No Fins, exhausted and joyless, he was going 7 meters beyond what was necessary to achieve one of his main goals. Instead of reading the signs and pulling back, satisfied merely to score or perhaps grab one American record, he refused to concede in his pursuit of bronze. He still wanted it all.
If he had announced 88 meters, he might have earned a white card. Instead, he hit the high 80s, couldn’t equalize any further, and went for it anyway. That’s when he thought his eardrum burst and surfaced with blood dripping from his mouth.
As the event wrapped for the day, Ren Chapman led the safety divers through an emergency evacuation drill. They practiced bringing a diver up from depth, placing him on the platform, sliding him onto a backboard, and loading him into their de facto ambulance. Along the way, Dr. Jeschke practiced using her unfamiliar kit. They did the same drill every day twice, just in case.
Meanwhile, Johnny and Nick walked to the car, and Johnny saw Nick spit blood. It wasn’t a lot, but it was enough to concern him considering he’d been out of the water for nearly an hour. When they got home, Nick stomped off to the beach to do a series of dry breath holds known as static tables.
“Dude, you shouldn’t be doing that,” Johnny said, “that’s not good.” But Nick wasn’t listening to Johnny, who was feeling strong and had kissed 105 meters in Constant Weight on opening day. As far as Nick was concerned, Johnny was a competitor, just like Ted Harty, and he wouldn’t take advice from a rival in the middle of a competition. He was once again locked into that self-destructive loop he’d escaped in Kalamata when he blogged about roaming the streets, “donating blood to the sidewalk.” In that same blog he wrote:
Any one who knows me at all knows that I don’t quit. I don’t let anything stop me from diving. Not squeezes or anything else.
As he loped toward the sand, it dawned on Johnny that once Jeschke determined Nick’s ear to be sound he would dive again, and soon. She’d already checked him on the beach before they’d left Dean’s Blue Hole. In her accident report following his death, she wrote:
As far as I know Nick Mevoli was a healthy young man and a world class freediver. On November 15 he had done a 95m FIM dive, where the safety divers had to assist him to come up. He thought that he had broken his eardrum. There was some blood coming out of his nose, as we often see it after a dive with equalisation problems. After the competition I examined his ear, the ear drum looked o.k., and he did neither cough nor complain about anything else.
Numerous eyewitnesses reported seeing blood coming from Nick’s mouth, not his nose, and a photograph taken that day by Daan Verhoeven confirms it. Jeschke missed it. A sinus squeeze isn’t nearly as dangerous as a lung squeeze, but in the presence of blood, most doctors wouldn’t wait for an athlete to complain of symptoms, they’d take a proactive approach. Dr. Jeschke explicitly mentioned checking Nick’s ear in her report, so it stands to reason that if she had put her stethoscope to his back and listened, she would have documented it. Based on her report, one can only assume that she never checked his lungs, yet still cleared him to compete.
Ashraf Elsayegh, the clinical chief of Pulmonary and Critical Care at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, says it can take one to four weeks for the alveoli to heal after pulmonary hemorrhage. Former world record holder Bob Croft said that back in the pioneering days of freediving if a diver came up with blood coming from the mouth, he’d be out of the water for a month. “Diving again too soon after pulmonary hemorrhage,” said Elsa
yegh, “can make further hemorrhage easier to occur.” Injured divers, he said, also have less lung reserve, which means the volume of air and amount of oxygen they can bring with them on a dive is limited, and equalizing at depth becomes an even bigger challenge.
After attending a potluck hosted by the safety divers at Greenwich Lodge, drinking a Kalik, popping into the kitchen to help prepare dinner, and having some laughs, Nick drove home and stewed. His public appearance made it seem that he was happy and well, but when he got home he messaged Tanc complaining of pain and exhaustion. “My ears hurt, my lungs hurt, my body hurts,” he wrote.
Tanc suggested he pull back and drop all expectations or better yet, not dive at all, rather than go for another record. “I told him really firmly, you’re tired. You’ve had a long season. You’re mentally fatigued, you’re physically fatigued, you haven’t had a break, and you’re not in peak fitness.” Nick wouldn’t give in. If he wasn’t going to go big, there was no point in diving at all. Meir received similar messages from Nick, and what he wrote back that night still haunts him:
Tommorow’s your day. I can feel it.
On November 15, Jen was in Orlando at Disney World with her two daughters, in line for “It’s a Small World,” when word came in from one of Nick’s friends that he’d suffered an injury. In that moment, she was struck by a dark premonition that knocked the wind out of her and sent her to one knee. For the past two years Nick had maintained his policy of keeping his family in the dark during competitions. He’d call to check in, so they knew where he was, but he didn’t want them stressed out, waiting for results. Often he wouldn’t tell them how he did, even and especially when he won a medal or broke a record. They’d have to search it out for themselves on Facebook. Jen didn’t even know he was diving that day, so the news came out of nowhere. She collected herself and messaged Nick directly to ask what happened and make sure he was okay. That night she would hear back:
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