On day three of the Caribbean Cup, the defending men’s champ, Will Trubridge, floated between the yellow ropes that attached the dive platform to the catamaran and delineated the competition zone. He looked serene, his hands folded over his navel, the slosh of the surface current rocking him deeper within. Will was starting to look more comfortable, more in tune. His opening dive, that 72-meter no-fins tribute to Nick, threw him more than expected, so he followed that with another nice and easy one, a Free Immersion dive to 111 meters. Only Will, and maybe Alexey, would consider 111 meters on one breath to be a foregone conclusion.
The surface was whitecapped thanks to a stiff wind that day, and at depth the current was roaring. Will took his position as always, resting and hanging between two safety sausages, as the whitecaps sprayed his face and jostled his body, and a speedboat bore down on the competition zone at high speed. Tournament officials waved their arms, urging the captain to change course and slow down. The captain did veer inside, but he didn’t ease the throttle and with a minute to go before his dive, Will was tossed about in the boat’s wake. He didn’t flinch.
The dive itself wasn’t so easy. As he dove past the 80-meter mark, the sonar faded and there was no way to track Will from the surface, but he blipped back on his way up and surfaced with a wobble, lost in a hypoxic haze. It looked like he was about to black out, but Carla’s shrill voice blasted through the fog, and she guided him home. Although he’d booked another white card, he didn’t look in top form.
The following day Will wore a monofin and was headed back down to 111 meters, this time in Alexey’s best discipline. Once again, the dive felt more like a placeholder than an attempt to push the envelope, but if he rocked it, he would have all three major disciplines on his scorecard, with three dives left to improve his position. More important, a white card would put him in first place overall and secure his position on the podium by the end of the competition.
With ten seconds to go before his top time, the announcer counted off the seconds and Will packed his lungs, one gulp of air at a time. After forty packs, he turned, folded forward, and began dolphin kicking to depth. Though conditions were ideal, the sonar feed was iffy again, and Will faded from the screen after crossing the 20-meter mark. Ren adjusted by organizing his safety team to drop based on Will’s estimated dive time of 3:15.
“We’re going on time,” he said. “First safety at 2:30.” By then Will was back on the feed at 40 meters and climbing. The safeties met him at 25 meters and followed him as he rocketed to the surface looking strong, far better than the days before. There was no need for Carla to bring him back from the foggy ethers this time. He was clear as a bell, and only slightly breathless. When the white card came, Will was in first place, with a long way to go.
Walid Boudhiaf was next in the zone. After his riveting 102-meter dive on opening day, Walid had taken a day off to replenish before looking to hit 106 meters in Free Immersion, extending his personal best and national record. Like Will, Walid prepared to dive on his back. His left hand gripped the line as the time ticked down, and he packed air with deep gulps and small sips. When it was time, rather than turn over, he pulled himself down with a gentle backbend.
Pull, glide, pull, glide, he hit 20 meters, began freefalling, closed his eyes, and enjoyed the ride. Sonar was lost somewhere after 80 meters, and he became impossible to track, so nobody knew the drama that awaited him at depth. Walid had no idea what was coming either. He was focused on equalizing and listening for his alarm, which would chime as he closed in on 106 meters.
Despite his success on day one, he knew the dive had taken too long, so he increased his neck weight—a horseshoe-like collar made from a bicycle inner tube filled with lead shot and wrapped in duct tape. It worked too well. His freefall was so swift that when the chime came he’d already passed the bottom plate. His lanyard yanked him hard and flipped him upright. He was surprised but stayed calm as that gnawing throb of narcosis reverberated in his brain. He grabbed the Velcro tag, secured it in the hood of his wetsuit, and reached for the line to climb back to depth, but when he pulled, he didn’t budge. He tried again. No luck.
He dropped down another meter and was horrified to find his lanyard looped in a knot around the tennis ball, which dangled as a float below the bottom plate. The throb of nitrogen narcosis, a buildup of nitrogen in the blood that can distort perception, grew louder. The bogeymen began invading his thoughts. He was 106 meters away from life and nobody knew what the hell had happened. There was no live video feed, and he knew sonar was iffy at depth. “For the first time, I felt scared,” he said later. “The only thing I was thinking of was to tell the people up there to release the counterweight system.”
For a moment he thought he might die, and was so narced that he didn’t even think about trying to unhook his carabiner from the line instead of wrestling with the knot beneath the plate. If he had, he could have started his ascent sooner, but it was also possible that due to the physical and emotional stress from spending extra time below 100 meters, he might become hypoxic too soon, black out at a level beyond the reach of the safety team, and drift away from the line. If that happened and he was unhooked, the counterbalance wouldn’t help, and there would be no saving him.
As narcosis grew and his mind blared with urgency and fear, Walid managed to untie the knot and head toward the surface, still fastened to the line. His contractions came early. His nervous system was on high alert, demanding oxygen, and his intercostal muscles rocked and shuddered, begging for it while he was still at 90 meters. That didn’t typically happen to Walid until around 40 meters and he considered it an ominous sign, but when he reached Ren at 30 meters, he was still conscious. Ren, who had been hanging at 30 meters for nearly twenty seconds looking for a sign of life, was relieved to see him. He’d been poised to shake the line, signaling the release of the counterballast, when Walid appeared.
At the surface, Kimmo watched Walid ascend without assistance. He flashed the okay sign, then backed away, clearing space for him to rise. After a dive of 4:05, he came to the surface having already removed his goggles and nose clip. He said the magic words and flashed the okay sign, but he couldn’t hold it. After seven seconds his body began to quake. That’s what divers refer to as a loss of motor control, or samba. Sometimes athletes emerge from a samba without losing consciousness. Walid blacked out, and fell into the arms of an alert safety team. He was out for only a few seconds, but he came to coughing a river of pink, frothy fluid. Edema. Walid was squeezed. Blood and plasma filled his mouth, larynx, and lungs.
By nature, the mammalian dive reflex sends excess blood and plasma into the lung’s blood vessels. On a normal dive, that fluid will recede back to the extremities without leaking into the lungs, but in Walid’s case his blood vessels became so engorged, and the extra stress and movement was so intense, he’d suffered a hemorrhage that filled his pulmonary system with edema. When he coughed it all came spewing out.
“That’s evidence of a significant lung injury,” Kerry said, and it immediately brought back memories of Nick. However, Walid produced much more fluid than Nick had when he died. Kerry placed a continuous positive air pressure mask on Walid to push the fluid out and within an hour, his lungs sounded normal.
Meanwhile, the competition was still on, and Alexey was in the zone, hoping to grab a new national record with a dive to 96 meters without fins. As he moved into position, upright on the line, Esteban Darhanpe was giddy. “Alexey is going to 96 meters, that’s just 5 meters from a world record. If everything goes okay, and he feels good in the next two days, maybe we can expect him to attempt a world record here?”
Will was skeptical. “Alexey is 9 meters behind me in no fins,” he said, “and the difference between 90 and 100 meters is a lot, but we’ll see.”
Alexey certainly allowed for the possibility, and he credited his early-season good form to hitting the weights like never before. When he started out in freediving he’d focused on yoga, so he could become more flexible and better relaxed at depth, but the deeper he went he found that weight training provided much-needed power and speed on long swims against negative buoyancy, and that if he maintained a strong pace, he would be less hypoxic at the surface and less dependent on longer breath holds.
Will doesn’t carry much muscle mass. At six feet one and 160 pounds, his core is strong, and his long legs and arms well defined, but he’s not bulky. He keeps his brown hair cropped, and his diet is nearly vegan, though he supplements his plate with protein he spears himself in the Bahamian reefs.
Alexey is six feet tall and 180 pounds, with the legs of a velodrome cyclist and a ripped upper body. In Roatan, his sandy blond hair was shaggy and receding, and his demeanor placid as a perfect day at sea. He shies away from carbs, but eats all manner of protein, topping off his daily calories by slurping smoothies made from musclehead protein powder, which is always within reach, whether he’s home in Moscow, training in Dahab, or competing in Roatan.
In freediving, every gift can be a detriment, and all weaknesses can become strengths. Those with enormous lung volume, like Ashley Chapman, are also more buoyant, which affects oxygen efficiency because they have to work harder to get down. Those with smaller lung capacity drop faster but have less available oxygen to call on during a long dive. In the same way, added bulk translates to higher oxygen demand. Alexey mitigated that with aggressive pool workouts to condition his muscles to withstand hypoxia, so he could rely on his tremendous strength to get to the surface before his oxygen well ran dry. It’s all about finding the balance. Will preferred to stay lean and efficient. In 2014, Alexey opted for power, and the prevailing opinion at the Caribbean Cup was that power would soon overcome, and it was only a matter of time before Alexey would eclipse Will in all disciplines.
The countdown began and at t-minus ten seconds, Alexey began packing air. He pursed his lips and sucked it in as if slurping a spaghetti noodle of oxygen molecules he’d need to burn from both ends on a dive he estimated would take 3:45. Packed for the journey, he flipped, resting for a beat on the surface before duck diving and carving the water with his powerful, angular breaststroke. In four strokes he hit 10 meters; after eight he faded from view just below 20 meters and began to freefall.
“Touchdown!” The announcement came at 1:55, and the gallery cheered. The sonar didn’t lose him this time and the announcer updated his progress every 10 meters. The hard work had now begun, and though he had made depth, he was running behind time. If he had his monofin, Alexey could expect to ascend at a rate of 1.2 meters per second. With no fins the rate was closer to .8 meters per second. He knew this because his dive computer tracked and graphed every dive, and like Will and other elite divers, those small details enabled Alexey to make the incremental tweaks necessary to squeeze out a few more meters.
Alexey must have been aware of the time crunch because he picked up speed, and at 3:45 he was already at 10 meters. He surfaced just ten seconds late at 3:55, but the hard swim had sapped his reserves. He hooked the line in the wrong direction, away from the judges and toward the dry boat. “Vichy!” Marina yelled. “Alosha, vichy!” She was telling him to breathe in Russian, and he tried to take his nourishing hook breaths, but on his second inhale, he lost consciousness, falling backward into the water. The judges backed away and the safety team moved in, but they didn’t grab him. Sometimes an athlete isn’t all the way gone, and can snap back to life without their assistance; as long as an athlete’s airway doesn’t dip beneath the surface, they are allowed to attempt to complete the protocol in less than fifteen seconds, and earn a white card.
But Alexey was blacked out all the way, and as soon as his face dipped, Ren cradled his head, keeping his airway above the surface. Marina kept yelling, “Alosha, vichy!” When an athlete blacks out at the surface, it’s as if they are in a shallow sleep, and can often be brought back with words of encouragement as well as a sharp breeze across the eyes. Ren removed Alexey’s nose clip and blew while Marina urged him to breathe. In less than ten seconds he was awake and breathing normally.
As Alexey swam over to see the doctor, Will slipped off the platform. Leaning on his monofin, he side-stroked to the dry boat, his record still 9 meters out of Alexey’s reach, while the gallery murmured, mulling the latest twist in the competition between two underwater gods.
“I think he’s done that depth in training,” said Will, grinding one of his homemade vegan protein bars, “but it’s a big jump to do it in competition. In no fins there is an exponential curve. In the space of four to five meters it can go from easy to very difficult. It could also just be a bad day. Seeing a blackout can affect you.”
Alexey didn’t think Walid’s problems affected his own performance. He was more concerned about his speed. “Of course, it would be better to have a white card, but all these little problems, they fine-tune your preparation. Every red card gives you valuable information.” Still, he’d already taken one comp day off, and now the red card. He had only three dives left and still needed to score in Free Immersion and Constant Weight. Would he move on from no fins, content to have pushed his needle just one meter? “I will rest and see tomorrow,” he said, “I don’t care about winning the overall. There’s not much prize here. If there was a proper cash prize or a car, then maybe, but otherwise I’ll just use this comp for training.”
Alexey was referencing a famous Static Apnea competition held annually in Dubai in which the winner gets a Range Rover and the runner-up, a Nissan Versa. In the last three years he’d won one Range and two Versas, which he sold in Dubai for over 150,000 euros combined. The Russian was nothing if not pragmatic. He’d dedicated 2013 to extending his Constant Weight record, which he’d set with an infamous dive in Kalamata, Greece, at the AIDA Individual Depth World Championship. 2014 would be the year of Constant No Fins, and one blackout wasn’t going to alter his game plan.
That night, Will and Alexey had dinner together. They spoke about training and tactics, and of the rumored medical reforms AIDA was considering in the wake of Nick’s death. At the top of a sport or industry, often the only peers available are competitors, so it’s natural to eventually become friends.
Their rivalry had not always been so chummy. The most significant flare-up occurred the year before in Kalamata, when Alexey broke the Constant Weight world record with a dive to 128 meters, a mark that brought him a gold medal and made him competitive freediving’s deepest man of all time. Much controversy surrounded that dive, but what irked Will was the surface protocol. He and another close rival, Guillaume Néry of France, claimed Alexey flashed the okay sign twice after he’d removed his nose clip. Clearing the face of all equipment signifies the beginning of the safety protocol, and a “double okay” after that is grounds for a red card. On video, he does seem to flash the okay sign once with his left hand and then again with his right, but the judges didn’t see it that way. If they had, Will would have won Constant Weight gold. He confronted Alexey, and told him he and Néry were filing a protest.
After a dive is complete, an athlete or athletes can file a protest, which the judges will hear later that afternoon or evening. Those hoping to get a red card reversed usually file them, but at world championship events, things get heated, and athletes do protest one another.
“There are rules but there is also common sense and fair play,” Alexey said about the incident. “I did the dive and I wasn’t shaking, there was no samba, and I wasn’t blacking out. I was clean. I told them if they did some minor thing wrong in the rules and the judges gave them a white card, I would never protest. I told them my opinion and they didn’t do it. So there was a little struggle after the dive, but no hard feelings. I was happy they didn’t [go forward with the protest] and that’s it, but it was a sensitive situation. It was a world record and they were trying to take it away from me.”
Then again, Alexey was now in the business of trying to take something away from Will. Despite his failed first attempt, Alexey knew he had 96 meters in him, and if he nailed it the second time, he believed he still had a chance at Will’s no fins record.
Alexey’s decision to gun for Will’s record appeared to be timed perfectly, because Will had been having trouble with his own pet discipline. In the run-up to the Caribbean Cup, Will’s training had not been going well. The world record holder, and only diver to reach 100 meters without fins, was struggling with dives beneath 90 meters. It was alarming because swimming without fins had been Will’s favorite thing to do ever since he was a boy living on a sailboat.
Will Trubridge was born in North England, but from the time he was two, he, his brother, and his parents cruised the high seas and worked and played in whichever port they docked. Australia, Tortola, Tahiti—wherever they landed, Will and Sam spent most of their time in the water diving for shells. When they moved to the family’s native New Zealand after Will turned eight, they carried on living aboard the boat for five more years, spending summers in Vanuatu and New Caledonia. The brothers occasionally got competitive underwater, and Will estimated that he could dive to 15 meters on one breath before he was ten years old.
In 2002, when Will was twenty-two, he abandoned his promising career as a genetic engineer in Auckland—the sterility of lab life bored him—and moved to London to work and travel abroad. One evening, his roommate returned from a trip to Ko Tao, Thailand, and told him about the freedivers he saw there. Will was curious, so he researched the sport online, and what he found intrigued him enough to practice dry breath holds on his bed and do some breath-hold swimming in a local pool, but he didn’t manage to impress himself. So he packed his bag and hit the road.
Will spent most of the London winter of 2003 in the Honduran Bay Islands, choosing nearby Utila over Roatan because it was more backpacker friendly. He spent every day in the water, morning and afternoon, often eclipsing forty dives in a day. He seldom used fins because he rarely used them growing up. The breaststroke was his default mechanism and he trusted it. He hitched rides to the offshore dive sites with scuba shops, so he could freedive through soft coral canyons and along walls draped in hard corals that fed schools of Technicolor tropical fish. He dove alone. Nobody watched his back, which was extremely dangerous, but he didn’t know any better at the time. “I remember coming up from one dive and feeling this buzz throughout my body and thinking, that was cool. Let’s do it again.” In reality that was his body sending signals that he should quit for the day or he might black out. Like Nick in those Florida springs, Will got lucky.
He didn’t dive with a depth gauge either, until his last day in the islands. As he swam toward the deeper, darker blue that sunlight couldn’t penetrate, he passed a handful of scuba divers who regarded him with a mixture of curiosity, alarm, and awe. It got darker and darker and soon he couldn’t equalize any further, so he turned and swam for the surface. He took a deep breath and another then looked at the gauge. He’d been to 46 meters without fins, and he’d never been coached. Like Nick Mevoli, Will Trubridge was a natural.
He finally did take a freediving course with the legendary Umberto Pelizzari later that year in Sardinia, and he became one of Pelizzari’s star pupils. Never a competitive athlete growing up, always better at chess than sport, Will was on the road to becoming the world’s best, and what set him apart was his ability to dive without fins, widely considered the most physically demanding discipline. After the course he stayed on in Sardinia, where he would train by paddling out to depth in a canoe and dropping a mooring in 55 meters of water, but it was never easy. He dodged speedboats and jellyfish constantly and contended with weather and wind swell. Rents were high in Sardinia, and it was difficult to make ends meet at first, but he soon secured a deal to translate Pelizzari’s Manual of Freediving into English, which kept the coffers full.
In 2004, the same year Pelizzari trained him to be a freedive instructor, Will entered his first competition and hit 55 meters without fins. He surfaced with a mask full of blood. Though he managed a white card, Will had suffered a bad sinus squeeze (when pressure injures tissue in the sinus). It would be his last dive for five months.
As his sinus healed, he spent the ensuing weeks doing apnea walks and other dry exercises to stay fit. It was a frustrating time because he knew the Constant No Fins world record was just 63 meters. He could see it, floating out there, well within reach, if only his body would cooperate. The following year, fully healed, he entered a competition in Sicily and hit 65 meters without fins, but by then the world record needle had moved.
Will had made progress, but he also knew that if he were to ever break a world record, he needed to live somewhere with ample and accessible depth and with reliable conditions year round. In late 2005 he heard whispers about Dean’s Blue Hole and set out to find it. Less than eighteen months later, when he dove to 81 meters without fins on April 9, 2007, in Dean’s Blue Hole, Will would have his first world record.
Constant No Fins had always been Will’s stake in the ground, and if he’d lost that gift, what would become of the rest of his career? Will was no upstart. He was thirty-four, closer to the end of his athletic prime than the beginning, and Alexey, twenty-seven, would only get stronger. But one thing helped Will rest easier as the competition wore on. He’d figured out what was holding him back.
Freedivers can be thrown off by the slightest mechanical error. Bad habits can creep up undetected and become a part of the diver’s natural preparation until they are identified and eliminated. Like a pure shooter in basketball rediscovering his three-point stroke, Will considered his preparation minute by minute and remembered that of late he was seeing small stars in his field of vision as he packed air into his lungs, and was no longer feeling an urge to breathe until well after descending to 50 meters. Those two factors led him to believe he was overbreathing during the final minutes before the dive. The breathe up before a dive can be a delicate thing. On the one hand he needed to lower his heart rate and CO2 level, which helps delay the urge to breathe and can stimulate the Bohr effect, when hemoglobin in the blood naturally binds to more oxygen, enabling muscles to use that oxygen more efficiently on the dive. But if CO2 levels are too low, the athlete won’t maximize the dive reflex or Bohr effect, and both are critical to a diver’s ability to push his physiological limit.
On day four of the competition, during his next Constant No Fins attempt to 90 meters, Will had no such worries. He sliced through the water with precision and elegance, and came up clean and on time at 3:35, showing no signs of mental fog at the surface. The dive looked easy for him, and Kimmo flashed a white card. Will had lengthened his lead in a competition that hadn’t yet lived up to its billing, because Alexey was still fixated on no fins, and it was fair to wonder if this would be much of a competition at all. It didn’t take long to get an answer.
Alexey was back in the zone as athletes and fans treaded water and peered below, Will among them. Watching his rival dive, Will hoped to take stock of him, evaluate his preparation, and see how much he had left in the tank in case the white card came and Alexey was that much closer to his record. Alexey was oblivious. Suspended upright, his eyes narrowed on the line, just centimeters from his face. When his top time came, he continued to pack air for twenty seconds before folding forward and swimming toward his elusive goal. He’d been down for nearly three minutes when Will took a breath and swam to 25 meters in his long bi-fins, hoping to catch a glimpse of Alexey’s form on his way up. They rose together. This time Alexey was seven seconds faster and oriented toward the judges, calm and under control, the tag peeking out from beneath his golden hood.
“Vichy,” Marina said, calmly. “Vichy.” Marina beamed with pride, and Alexey almost smiled as he went through the protocol without a glitch.
“A new national record!” The announcer boomed from the platform.
“Beautiful dive, Alexey,” one of the safety divers called out.
“That was tough,” Alexey said with a smile. “I’m getting tired of that. Maybe I try to win now?” By day’s end, Will was in the lead, but the pressure behind him was mounting.
With Alexey setting his sights on Caribbean Cup gold, and Will diving well, there was a good vibe glowing around West Bay, but Walid wasn’t thrilled. Kerry had banned him from the remainder of the competition. “I understand that they are being careful, but physically there’s nothing wrong with me,” he insisted. Walid never considered a ban a possibility after his frightening experience at 106 meters. He took a day off to recuperate plus the official off day, before announcing a 108-meter Free Immersion dive, which was placed on the schedule pending Kerry’s clearance.
What makes it so difficult to detect a lung squeeze is that once edema leaves the lungs, which can happen in hours, there is no way to determine if there is indeed an injury. There are no nerves in the lung, so pain isn’t a major factor, and only large tears show up on an ultrasound. Three days after his squeeze, Walid had no lingering symptoms, but Kerry wasn’t going to clear him. Not after what happened to Nick. She didn’t base her decision on science. There wasn’t a body of knowledge about lung squeezes and their recovery to work with. Kerry just knew something had to be different. Walid tried to change her mind. “This happens, but my body adapts and it’s okay,” he said.
“No,” Kerry replied, “it’s not okay, and if this happens repetitively, that’s exactly what happened to Nick.” Walid fumed. He didn’t like that she made a decision based on Nick rather than his own medical condition, and was furious that Esteban and Kimmo backed her even though there was no AIDA rule in place allowing a doctor to bench an athlete. She hoped he’d take at least a couple of weeks off to heal, but could only control him for the rest of the comp.
On the second to last day of the competition, Will and Alexey traded blows. Alexey began by besting Will in Free Immersion with an easy dive to 112 meters. For the moment he led in two of the three disciplines, with his best discipline, Constant Weight, still to come. Then Will shocked everyone with an announced Constant No Fins dive to 97 meters.
“He hasn’t been doing well in training,” one safety diver whispered. “He doesn’t have it,” said another, but everyone wanted to watch him try, because watching Will swim without fins is like watching Usain Bolt run or LeBron James fly. The way his long, slender arms and legs extend and fold into a rhythmic flow of precise right angles, gathering water with their momentum and thrusting him down with superhuman force and effortless glide, is perfection in motion.
At 80 meters, with a dive time of 1:30, he faded from the sonar feed, blipping back during his ascent at 75 meters. He’d been underwater for 2:45. The rest of the ascent went smoothly and on time, and he surfaced at 3:51, grabbing the line and holding himself high above the surface with both hands. Good thing, because as he used his right hand to remove his goggles, he began to slip. Fluid goggles often stick tight to the eye socket and he struggled to remove his, while the shock of his first hook breath stopped him cold. He’d made the okay sign, but struggled to find the air and strength to say the words as he fumbled the tag into the sea.
His lips were blue, he’d stopped breathing, and was about to black out, but Carla was there to catch him. “Breathe!” She shouted. “Keep breathing!” Suddenly the light switched back on, and he said the words, “I’m okay.” Then he shook his head and sighed, clearing the cobwebs, his tunnel vision expanding to take in the scene of fifty odd divers and fans watching a master at work. Yes, he’d fumbled the tag, but the judges had seen it and they offered a white card. Will pumped his fist. Alexey had served notice, and Will reminded him he was still the no fins king. He was back in the lead with one dive to go.
The scoring system controversy would have no effect on the men’s division. Going into the final day, Will had the top performance in Constant No Fins with 97 meters and Constant Weight with 111 meters, and was just a meter behind Alexey in Free Immersion. Alexey led that category with 112 meters, and had scored a 96-meter no fins dive. That evening they each crunched numbers to determine a depth and discipline that would give them the crown, and both opted for their monofin. Will announced 116 meters, but this was Alexey’s go-to discipline, and he announced a powerhouse dive of 123 meters, just 5 meters off his record.
It was fitting that on the last day of the Caribbean Cup, after the contentious women’s race had been settled, Alexey and Will, the sport’s two deepest men, would deliver the final dives. The crowd had swelled in the last two days. Tourists rented kayaks to paddle out and watch, while others hopped on the athlete transport panga. Close to sixty people were either bunched on the bow of the dry boat or in the water surrounding the competition zone, under an incandescent tropical sun.
At 12:27 p.m. on May 31, Will duck dove and began dolphin kicking toward depth, touching down just under two minutes later. The announcer clocked him as he ascended, and at 3:10, he came back into sight, 20 meters below. He pierced the surface, completed the protocol on time, and afterward hung diagonally off the line with a playful grin. The crowd erupted in cheers. His competition was done. Six white cards in six dives and a gold medal within reach. But was it a gold medal performance? Alexey would have something to say about that.
“Bring in the Russian,” Ren shouted as anticipation rippled through the gallery and the bottom plate was moved to 123 meters. Alexey had been pushing the limit in Constant No Fins all tournament long, but this would be his first Constant Weight dive and his first dive of any kind above 112 meters. While the pressure difference between the low 110s and 120s doesn’t amount to much, nitrogen narcosis can become a real problem. With every added second of dive time, and every additional meter of depth, more nitrogen builds in the bloodstream, which clouds the brain. Nitrogen narcosis didn’t concern Alexey, though, especially when wearing a monofin. He’d been swimming with one since he was sixteen years old.
Alexey was born in Volgograd, Russia, a sprawling city on the Volga River, in the Southern plains, once known as Stalingrad. His mother, Natalia Molchanova, taught him to swim when he was three, and by the time he was five years old he’d set the national age group record in the 800-meter backstroke. Alexey was soon his age-group champion in freestyle and butterfly, as well. Alexey was a swim prodigy, and in Russia, swim prodigies are sent to sports schools where Olympic champions are groomed.
His school was in St. Petersburg, where he switched to fin swimming. Popular in Russia, China, and Brazil and well known throughout Europe, fin swimmers wear monofins and special snorkels, which allow them to skim just beneath the surface, dolphin kicking all the way. It’s strange yet elegant and much faster than traditional swimming. For instance, the 50-meter fin swimming world record of 15.06 seconds, set by Russian Pavel Kabanov in July 2014, is nearly six seconds faster than the freestyle 50-meter world record of 20.91 set by Cesar Cielo in Brazil in 2009. William Paul Baldwin of Greece owns the 100-meter fin swimming mark with a time of 34.18 seconds, which is more than 15 seconds faster than Michael Phelps’s world record in the 100-meter butterfly.
Alexey made the switch to recapture the joy of swimming, which had begun to wane for him just a bit. It wasn’t a calculated move to jump-start a future freedive career, but it worked out that way. As a seventeen-year-old high school graduate, Alexey moved to Moscow, where his mother had begun freediving in earnest. She became his coach once again, and when she went to Cyprus to compete in the 2004 AIDA World Championship, Alexey tagged along. He competed for the first time in 2005, when he was just eighteen years old, and his 82-meter dive in Constant Weight made him the seventh best in the world.
Nine years later, on May 31, 2014, he was trying to defeat the very best and win an overall title against Will Trubridge for the first time. He’d have to hammer his 123-meter dive to do it, something he projected would take 3:45. The sonar followed him to 90 meters and cut out. He’d been underwater for 1:30, and the gallery was held in suspense as the announcer squinted toward the feed, looking for Alexey’s fuzzy, digital trail. At 80 meters he was back on line and on the way home; 2:40 had passed. Thirty seconds later he was at 50 meters and the safety divers were on their way down to meet him.
Alexey picked up his pace as the seconds ticked off and he came into view just after hitting 20 meters at 3:35. Five seconds later he was at 10 meters. He took his time from there, gliding the rest of the way and breaking the surface at 3:53. “Vichy,” Marina said, “vichy.” Just one look and she knew he had it.
He grabbed the line with one hand and removed his yellow nose clip with the other, flashed the okay sign and said, “I’m okay,” with a breathy whisper. He removed the tag from his hood, and this time the judges didn’t need to huddle to make a decision. Kimmo flashed a white card. Alexey had won.
That night, the athletes gathered one more time on the beautiful beach fronting the boutique, West Bay Resort. A stage was erected, a dance floor laid out, and a DJ was on the decks, ready to spin beats for the eager divers who finally permitted themselves a beer, a rum, and another beer after that. Esteban began the awards ceremony speaking English, but the Latin Quarter wasn’t having it. “Espanol!” they demanded gleefully, “Espanol!” They were in Honduras, after all.
In lieu of medals, trophies made of shells, carved by a local artist, were handed out. Carlos Coste, whose 100-meter dive on the final day of the competition earned him a place on the podium, won bronze. Will nabbed silver and Alexey took the top prize. Afterward the three giants of the sport took photos and signed a copy of the event poster, along with the winners from the women’s side.
Will was as graceful as ever and there were smiles all around, but whether he acknowledged it or not, he was aware that observers within the sport, and almost all the athletes present, were certain they had witnessed a changing of the guard. With his victory, Alexey, for years Will’s heir apparent, had been declared the new king. Or so went the theory. By the bar, on the dance floor, in the barefoot shallows, and even later at a boozy nightclub on the hill, that’s what everyone was buzzing about. Will wasn’t so sure.