Depth Wish | Deep Water Ep1

Die Observer. Ich habe mich in der Pfanne auf den Blumen auf der Blumen, für meine ganze Freude in der Welt. Und das ist über das Beste. Es ist wie im Stadion, wie in einem Bottom von einem Ampitheater. Es ist etwas zuimposiert in dieser Situation, aber wenn sie in der Luft sind, die Konditions sind so perfekt. Es ist die beste Konditions in der Welt für Freude. Das ist ein Close-Friend des Mein, Gary McGraw. Ich weiß ihm, weil wir auch Freude ist. Darum ist es um ein sehr schweres Tag auf der Sol. Ampitheater, der am Ampitheater, der am Ampitheater, ist die Hose in der Bahamas. Es ist die Hose des Verteilungsschäuern, die die beste Konditions- und Freude in der Kondition. Wir sind in der Welt auf der Bautomacht, die von der Konditionen auf der Bautomacht, die die beste Konditionen in der Welt sind. Die Konditionen sind die Bautomacht, die die beste Konditionen in der Welt sind. Und diese sind die Leute-Divers, die Welt- und Freude sind. Es muss man sehen, ob es ist. Alle July können sich auf eine kleine Caribbean-Island mit einem Stimplen nehmen, so wie kann sie sich in eine Single-Breath sein. Wenn du es nicht gemacht hast, die Chance, die du die meisten Börse auf den Netflix sehen, du siehst in YouTube-Videos von Menschen, die die Konditionen hergekommen sind und die Blacken aus. Es ist ein Extremesport, aber ich weiß die erste Zeit, die Konditionen erinnern. Und was ich mir verwendet, ist, dass es nicht ein Drennel in Sport ist. Für ein Dive-To-Sex-Seed, die Dive-To-Sex-Seed muss sich komplett kompensieren und relaxen. Die erste Ein paar Minuten, die du nicht machen, aber auf der Seite auf der Seite, die die fast und die die die die. Und die eine Stilmung, die wir dann mit uns mit uns unter den Wasser klingen. Any Thoughts, Any Noise, Real or in your mind, are left on the surface. Und dann du siehst. Und es ist ein Silenz. Ein Einflug, ein Blösen, wenn ich mich immer mal sehen, ich habe die Wasser von dem Bühne, die die beste, die wunderschöne. Wenn du unterst, gibt es nur eine Singierfokas. Ich halte meine Eise und dann habe ich einfach nur über alles reflekt, was passiert in meinem Körper. Ich fokuss auf die Fingern des Schicks, auf die Konditionen, auf die Rope. Es gibt nur das Gefühl des Begrüßes, in den Momenten, dass ich nicht mehr mehr verwenden kann. In die ersten 10 Metern your body is buoyant, und du musst die ganze Zeit auf der Seite, either bei Kicken mit long Fins, bei Swimming, oder bei using the rope, die sich selbst zu den Däten. Mit deinem Eier ist er die Eise geblieben, und du wirst die Eise durch die Qualität des Leises. Das ist der DPR. Als du auf die Lunge geblieben hast, du hast eine Preciue, und dann du losgeblieben und dann kommst einen Punkt, wo du die Fingern oder Flotte hast, du hast einfach ein bisschen mehr Zeit und diesen Moment des Dätschen und auch hier im Meer ist etwas, wo ich fühle ich es voll, als Pies. Ein finales Kick-All-Pool hier wird dann wieder auf die Puppe geliebt. Das ist das das erste, die Part der Dive beginnt. Das ist das Freifel. Und bei diesem Punkt du einfach einfach im Sinking und im Lachen und im Lachen zu den Spielen und es ist eine so gute Feeling, wenn es auf der Seite ist und alles zu arbeiten. Bei 30 m, die Lunge ist zu den Pflanzen zu fangen, du hast mehr Dätschen, du schaffst einfach nur 1 m/s. Und du knowst diese Feeling of the Water surrounding you, maybe it comes from a development, but it's really something I enjoy of it, and then you hit the bottom of the line without even realising it. You know, there was no anxiety in your thoughts about how do you go. Und jetzt, die Hardware, beginnt, ist es Zeit zu sein. Let's say this is 100 m dive, there's now 100 m of water above you. By now you've been submerged for around 1 minute 40 seconds. That's 100 m of work to get back to the surface, back to your breath. Deep divers, often describe 100 m as a spiritual depth. To get down there is impressive, to get back up again, the strength, focus and trust required is formidable. And on occasions that everything falls into place, we call that a beautiful dive. Those kind of dives, I think what we all search for, those are the one three diving. I have to have a gain and a gain and a gain. That's three minutes of work on that actual dive, but you don't think about the year of work that's gone in beforehand. And it's that year of work that I love, it's that journey that I love. And to skip parts of that journey or to shortcut it, I would just wouldn't feel honest to me. That journey, to achieve peace at depth, is what captivates three divers and keeps us coming back for more. And though it's a small sport, it's growing rapidly, attracting a wider audience, capturing the attention of the Olympic Committee. But for a while now rumours have been circulating that there are drugs that can shortcut that process, overcome the anxiety, override the body's warning signs to get you deeper. When I first heard the rumours I was stunned, the idea of being a hundred meters deep is already so intimidating. Why would you add more risk? So I asked around and I began to realise just how deep the water is. I am Lydia Gard and from Tortoise Investigates and the Observer, this is Deep Water. Episode 1, depth wish. In the beginning I had to get over the nerves of being in a place like that. You're in the free diving church, it's like a cathedral. It's such a well-known spot for us free divers. And to actually be there, be lucky enough to go there and compete there, that was something I had to get used to. But once I did, it's just heaven. In 2022, Gary McGraw dived to 112 meters at vertical blue. That's the same distance as 34 floors of a skyscraper. The dive took three minutes and 13 seconds and when he returned to the surface, he had the British National Record. Year after year, free divers like Gary test the limits of human endurance to reach greater depth. And the same was expected the following year in 2023. World record attempts were planned and the chosen few elite divers began to gather on Long Island in the Bahamas. Except that year's competition will be remembered for very different reasons. My name is Marin Simone. I'm from Belgium, a free diver from Belgium and I hold the national records from there. That July, Marin Simone steps off the plane at Deadman's Key. Today is going to be my sixth year of competing. I went straight into competition because I was like, "Okay, let's try to go deep and that was it." You have to understand, free diving is a relatively small sport and the people who compete are just a fraction of the community as a whole. Maybe a couple of hundred people around the world compete in depth and of them there might be 50 or 60 divers whose lives revolve around the competition calendar. They travel between Kalamata and Greece and Dominica in the Caribbean, cash in Turkey to Dahab Egypt. But you don't just turn up and dive. You'd need to spend a few weeks at a competition site if you're really trying for a record. That way you can get your bearings and settle in. Your body can get used to the water temperature and something called the thermocline, which is an invisible layer in the ocean where the temperature drops sometimes dramatically. And the divers train together, coach one another. They share airbnb's for weeks, sometimes months while they prepare for competition. They eat together, they sound like they're going to be in a good mood. Sometimes even sleep together, but most importantly they depend on each other for in-water safety. The first rule of freediving never dive alone. Free divers literally depend on each other for survival. What I'm getting at here is that this is a close circle. We know each other. If globally freedivers are a community and competition divers are a tribe, will vertical blue competitors are something closer to a family? When marine lands, the first thing she does is message your friend. Asking her, "Hey, are you there yet?" and she was like, "Yeah, have you heard about the big thing?" And then she told me, and obviously in the first place you're like, "Whoa!" While marine was flying across the Atlantic, preparing for the days ahead, a drama was unfolding on Long Island. A rip tide in what should be serene water. Among the athletes who have already touched down in the Bahamas, there are big names in the freediving world. Some of them controversial like the Croatian team. They have big plans for this competition. One of them, Petar Clover, is aiming to challenge a world record which has stood since 2016. And when they arrive at Deadman's Key Airport on the 4th of July 2023, after a long flight, they're met by the competition organiser. It's not a welcome committee. He's accompanied by the police and he asked to inspect their luggage. She told me that there had been a big search on arrival the day before and that things were found in the luggage of the Croatian team. Between them, the divers have three bags and what's found in them causes a storm surge. 33 different substances are found in the bags. One of which is banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency and other medications widely believed to be performance enhancing, not to mention potentially dangerous. The entire search is recorded. The news spreads through the community and what's up chats are blowing up. Instagram is flooded with questions. The Croatian athletes at the centre of this are Vitameer Marichic, Petar Clover and Sandra Delaya and they're accused of doping. The community in the first place is like a family because we're all experiencing kind of the same stuff, being away from home for a long time and pushing our own limits, the limits of our bodies and it has some difficulties. So we're a very strong family and then this thing happens and the thing that happens is really a polarization of the community. For several months in the run up to the competition, rumours have been circulating about these athletes, about a corrupting influence that has entered the sport. And now, while there's recorded evidence, divers have arrived at a world record status competition with suitcases full of pharmaceuticals. The real turning point, I think for most people, was vertical blue. It was heard about it when the vertical blue comes left. I was with Vitameer and Petar and that's caused a lot of friction. It's just a polarising issue. I don't think it'll ever go away. The search becomes known as the doping scandal and it splits the community. On social media, there were those who signed and shared a petition calling to ban them. Vitriolic Instagram and Facebook post circulated, calling the team cheats and liars. While others in their support focused on how the bag search was orchestrated, how the creation team had been singled out, how it looked like a setup. Why were they the only team that were searched? I heard a strong opinion in the first place. Then you realise that nothing is either black or white, just like in life. The divers, whose bags were found full of drugs, publicly stated that the accusations of doping were false, unfair and unfounded. But something had changed in three diving. Fast forward to today, they're still competing and winning world records. They're standing on the podium next to or in place of divers who signed petitions to have them banned. And as new depths are reached, competitors now look at one another with a level of suspicion. And it's prompted me to ask, "If there is ink in the water, how do you stop it from spreading?" I didn't set out to bring these two parts of my life together. If anything, I've worked hard to keep them separate. Journalism has worked. Free diving is my sanctuary. Although I suppose I have one to thank for the other. As a travel writer, I was commissioned to review a retreat in 2022. So in 2022, I was running a breath work and movement retreat along with a friend that was in Andalusia in a place called Suria Lila, it's like a yoga retreat centre. When I was invited, I wasn't convinced. The breath work element of the retreat did not appeal to me. The idea of lying still fills me with dread. But it was a chance to reset. So I booked my flight to Spain, but I packed my running shoes just in case I needed to escape. Free diving wasn't actually in the programme of the whole retreat, but because of the fact that I just started free diving and of course every free diver needs to tell everybody else that there are free diving and free diving is the best thing in the world. So I decided to tell all the participants about this beautiful practice. At Impertruths, who was running the retreat, was not a tall what I'd expected from a breath work coach. I had imagined this Instagram, Sheiman, or Hushtones and Prayer Beads and then inwalked this normal guy in jeans and a t-shirt, a recovering graphic designer with an undercut and an orcatatu on his forearm. I had no idea that meeting him would lead me here now. On the last day of the retreat, we ran to Lake Arcos for a swim. It looked like a puddle and I decided that it would be a great idea to do a static breath hold in that lake. A static breath hold is exactly what it sounds like. The diver remains still on the surface, only their face, their airways submerged and you stay like that for as long as you can on a single breath. So that could be one of the worst places that you could try free diving, but still you love them. I know it sounds like a strange thing to fall in love with. There's not much to it really, just holding your breath, face down in a murky lake, just you and the air in your lungs. That first minute or so is, frankly, outrageous. It's a strange struggle just trying to remain calm and your body is literally crying out for you to breathe. But the urge to breathe isn't the same as being low on oxygen. It's just increased CO2. It's a physiological response. With practice, you learn to notice it and let it go. And then this stillness comes as your heart rate starts to slow. You begin to turn your attention inwards to the sensations in your body and everything becomes calm. You feel peaceful. I didn't realise it then, but this was my first real experience of mindfulness. And when I came up for air, I had this huge rush of endorphins. I felt ecstatic. I wanted to go again. My first breath hold lasted for two minutes. Martin seemed pretty pleased. I tried again and I reached two and a half, then three minutes twenty seconds. And we both got quite excited then. I remember you saying that you were doing something similar on your own. Like just diving and pulling yourself down on an empty chain. I know that you are very good in water. Water is my element. I grew up on boats and beaches. My sister and I would compete over who could hold their breath for the longest as we were ragdolled in the surf. I collected shells and empty bottles from the seabed and never really thought about it. A lot of British freedivers come to this sideways from spearfishing. They get frustrated when they can't get deep enough for a catch and turn to freediving for answers. Around the world there are loads of tribes and communities that depend on freediving for their livelihoods. Like the Malaysian Baujao fishermen or the Japanese Amma women. There's a sponge harvesting tradition in Greece called Scandalipetra where they dive head first holding a big stone to pull them to the bottom. The point is, none of us knew we were freediving until we were told. Back on the surface, the quality of my breath is changed. I feel less anxious, less preoccupied by worries. I'm more connected to myself, stronger. That's the pull for me. I learned to surrender to the water and it reconnected me to myself. That's sold hug that I mentioned. That's what unites us. Well, that's what I thought. But maybe I've been romanticizing it. With time I realized that there is this strong competitive component to it and a lot of people are really pushing. It's very peculiar because well the money is very low so that is not the incentive. For all the spirituality, freediving is a sport. A sport measured in numbers and where there's competition, there's ego. I wanted freediving to be this simple world I could escape into. But every conversation leads back to the doping scandal and what came afterwards. Everyone wants to know what's going to happen and there are no clear answers and I'm a journalist. I just want to know the truth. So we are in Mitakas. We landed last night quite late in Athens and drove half the way here. Work up this morning and finish the journey and we're waiting for Dave Meller. I can see the dive boat now coming in. I've just arrived back from a morning's training. It's August 2025 and I'm in Mitakas, Greece. A tiny village set right on the water only accessible by miles of winding mountainous road. And Dave Meller is here training for the world championships. This is the guy Martin put me in touch with and he became my coach. As a multiple world record holder, he is my gateway into the world of competition freediving. Why are you speaking up about the doping issue? I don't like what it's doing to the sport. I don't like what's going on because like two years we're talking later is a sport in a better position now than it was two years ago? No, 100% not. Are more people using drugs of some sort? Probably yes. So you know, the doping scandal at Vertical Blue offered an opportunity to address a divisive issue that was corrupt in the sport and in the eyes of many in the community that opportunity was wasted and that has consequences. I didn't realise at the time I thought it was just some people are cheating to get results but I didn't realise what impacts that can have on the whole community, the whole sport. So that's what this story is about. About a community that's a microcosm of society and how the fabric of that society has started to fray. In freediving, that corrupting influence takes the form of a group of people determined to push their bodies and the sport to the limit of what's possible. But it's not straightforward because the medications that may help enhance performance in freediving aren't helpful in most sports. Many of them aren't on the wild antidoping agency's list of prohibited substances. They may be performance enhancing but they aren't technically doping and if people are taking them to dive deep, well best case scenario those divers will dominate the podiums clean athletes will give up and the sport's dead in the water. Worst case scenario, people will die. This kind of like the cartel you want the Pablo Escobar court, don't you? You know maybe the thing crumbles a little bit or something done. There's no deterrent at the moment because nobody's getting caught, nobody's even seen to be in court and if someone does get caught it's hushed up. Coming up in episode two of Deep Water. There was some performances that were making people think wow this person either is one in ten million or somebody else is happening. Part of what's wrong with competitive freediving how it's so open to abuse. I got told that there was like a group that was forming and they were getting together to try to find a way to do something about it. Who is in that group? Deep Water is reported by me, Lydia God. The producer is Gary Marshall, Music Supervision and Sound Design by Carla Patella, podcast artwork by Lola Williams, fact checking by Poppy Bullard. The executive producer is Basha Cummings. Hello it's Gary here I'm the producer of Deep Water. Before I tell you a bit more about how you can listen to the rest of the series we have a house notice. You have seen some changes to our feeds and that's because we're now bringing our Torotois Investigate series to you from our new home, the Observer. It's the world's oldest Sunday newspaper where you can listen to and read incredible journalism every day, seven days a week. So if you're enjoying this podcast you can listen to all six episodes today by subscribing to Observer Plus on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. By subscribing you get ad free early access to all our investigations and never miss an episode. Thank you for listening.