THE TRIUMPH AND TRAGEDY OF THE WORLD’S BEST FREEDIVER
ON A CLEAR MORNING in early September 2019, a Russian diver bobs gently on the sparkling blue surface of the Mediterranean next to a support raft a mile off the shore of the French Riviera. At five feet 11 inches and nearly 190 pounds, Alexey “the Machine” Molchanov is sheathed in a golden wetsuit, his feet snug in a sleek black monofin. He looks far larger than the lean safety divers who surround him in the water, waiting for the world’s reigning freediving champion to begin his descent.
Alexey wraps his fingers carefully around a dive line descending from the floating platform beside him. Inhaling and exhaling slowly, he prepares for the single breath he will hold for the nearly four minutes he plans to spend underwater. His target: a metal ring lined with white tags, suspended at the seemingly impossible-to-reach depth of 130 meters (about 426 feet). Round trip, that’s a journey roughly equivalent to two and a half soccer fields. His goal is to grab a tag and then swim back to the surface before his lungs expire or his muscles give out—or both.
“Three minutes,” a judge shouts from the raft. With that, the countdown to Alexey’s gold-medal attempt in freediving’s premier open-water competition, the AIDA Depth World Championship, begins.
Competitive freedivers—those compelled to dive as deep, or as far, as possible on a single breath—have several ways to distinguish themselves: with or without fins, the assistance of the dive line, or weights, or even hitched to a heavy sled. Today’s event, known as constant weight, is Alexey’s specialty, and while most divers wear a weight belt to aid their descent, he relies solely on the weight of his monofin and his powerful mermaid-style kick.
As the time ticks down, Alexey slips on his noseclip, which has been hanging crosslike around his neck, and adjusts its tiny metal arms over each nostril.
