Freediving
Based on Wikipedia: Freediving
The Last Breath Before the Deep
In 2012, Herbert Nitsch took one breath and descended 253 meters into the ocean. That's more than twice the height of the Statue of Liberty, achieved with nothing but the air in his lungs and a weighted sled to pull him down. At that depth, the pressure crushes the air in his lungs to a fraction of their surface volume. His heart rate drops to perhaps ten beats per minute. His spleen contracts, releasing a reserve of oxygen-carrying red blood cells. His body becomes something closer to a marine mammal than a typical human.
This is freediving at its most extreme. But the sport—if we can even call something with two thousand years of history a sport—has roots far more practical than record-breaking.
Diving for Treasure and Trade
Long before anyone strapped a tank to their back, humans were plunging into the sea on a single breath. They had to. If you wanted sponges in Ancient Greece, you sent divers down for them. If you wanted pearls in the Persian Gulf, same story. The technology was simple: a stone weight called a skandalopetra, sometimes as heavy as fifteen kilograms, to speed the descent. The rest was lungs, willpower, and the constant risk of blacking out before reaching the surface.
The island of Kalymnos, in the Aegean Sea, became the center of the Mediterranean sponge trade. Divers there routinely descended thirty meters—about a hundred feet—to harvest the soft, porous animals that wealthy Greeks used for bathing. Plato mentions sponges. Homer mentions sponges. The trade was ancient even to the ancients.
But sponges were just the beginning. The Mediterranean was crisscrossed with trading vessels, and trading vessels sank in storms. Where there were shipwrecks, there were salvage divers. Freediving became a commercial enterprise, a way to recover lost cargo from the seabed.
It also became a tool of war.
Underwater Soldiers
During the Peloponnesian War—the brutal fifth-century conflict between Athens and Sparta that reshaped the ancient Greek world—freedivers served as underwater couriers. When enemy blockades cut off communication with allies or surrounded troops, divers would slip beneath the ships, carrying messages and supplies.
In 332 BCE, Alexander the Great besieged the island city of Tyre. The defenders knew their harbor. They sent divers down to cut the anchor cables of Alexander's attacking ships, setting them adrift and buying time. It didn't ultimately save them—Alexander built a causeway to the island and conquered it anyway—but for a moment, freedivers changed the course of a battle.
Cities built underwater barricades to protect their harbors, and attacking forces sent divers to scout and dismantle them. The ocean floor was contested territory.
The Pearl Divers
If sponge diving was work, pearl diving was something closer to gambling. The Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, the waters between Sri Lanka and India—for thousands of years, these were the great pearl fisheries of the world. Divers descended on a breath and a prayer, prying open oysters in the hope of finding something valuable.
Most oysters contained nothing. But occasionally, one held a pearl worth more than a year's wages.
In Japan, the ama divers—predominantly women—began harvesting pearls about two thousand years ago. The tradition continues today, though now they mostly gather abalone and sea urchins for the luxury food market. For centuries, the ama dove with nothing but a loincloth and a knife, their bodies adapting to the cold and pressure through sheer practice.
The Philippines had their own pearl divers, working the Sulu Archipelago in the southern islands. The stakes there were particularly high. The largest pearls belonged by law to the sultan. Selling them without permission was a capital offense. Yet somehow, the most magnificent specimens kept appearing in the jewelry boxes of European nobility. Smugglers, it turns out, were as ancient as trade itself.
Pearl diving spread across the globe: Qatar, Bahrain, the Gulf of Mexico, the rivers of the American heartland. Native Americans harvested freshwater pearls from the Ohio, Tennessee, and Mississippi rivers, while Caribbean divers brought up marine pearls from tropical waters.
The Modern Sport Emerges
For most of human history, freediving was simply what people did when they needed something underwater. The concept of doing it for competition or recreation was largely absent. That changed in the twentieth century.
In 1940, an American woman named Dottie Frazier began freediving along the California coast. She wasn't harvesting pearls or sponges. She was doing it for the experience, for the challenge. She started teaching classes, pioneering freediving as a recreational activity for women in the United States. She even designed and sold rubber suits for Navy Underwater Demolition Team divers—the precursors to the Navy SEALs.
Spearfishing drove much of the early recreational interest. The practice itself was ancient—humans had been spearing fish from rivers since prehistory—but modern spearfishing combined it with breath-hold diving and increasingly sophisticated equipment: elastic-powered spearguns, pneumatic spears, specialized fins and masks.
Spearfishing remains one of the most sustainable forms of fishing. There's no bait to attract unintended species. There's almost no bycatch. You see exactly what you're hunting and choose whether to take the shot. Many countries have outlawed spearfishing while using scuba gear, recognizing that the unlimited underwater time gives divers too great an advantage over the fish. Freediving keeps the hunt fair—or at least fairer.
How Deep Can Humans Go?
The human body was not designed for depth. Every ten meters of descent adds roughly one atmosphere of pressure. At thirty meters, the pressure is four times what it is at the surface. Your lungs, which held perhaps six liters of air at the start of your dive, now hold less than two. At a hundred meters, they've compressed to something closer to the size of fists.
Early scientists believed that diving beyond fifty meters would crush the chest cavity and kill the diver. They were wrong, but not entirely. The body does adapt—blood shifts from the extremities into the thoracic cavity, essentially filling the space that compressed air would otherwise leave as a vacuum—but there are limits. The deeper you go, the closer you approach them.
Today, competitive freediving is governed primarily by two international organizations: AIDA International and the Confédération Mondiale des Activités Subaquatiques, known by its French initials as CMAS. Each maintains its own records and rules.
The disciplines vary. Static apnea measures how long you can hold your breath while floating motionless in a pool. The current Guinness World Record is eleven minutes and fifty-four seconds, set by Serbian freediver Branko Petrović in 2014. Nearly twelve minutes without breathing. The mental discipline required to override your body's screaming demand for oxygen is almost impossible to comprehend.
Dynamic apnea measures how far you can swim underwater on a single breath, either with fins or without. Constant weight diving measures depth—how deep you can descend and return under your own power, typically using a monofin that turns your lower body into something resembling a dolphin's tail.
And then there's no limits diving, the most dangerous and spectacular discipline. Divers use a weighted sled to descend and an inflatable lift bag to return. It's pure depth, nothing else. Herbert Nitsch's 253-meter dive fell into this category. He survived, but barely—the dive caused severe decompression sickness despite the absence of compressed air, and his recovery took years.
The Physiology of Breath-Holding
When you hold your breath, your body doesn't simply wait passively. It fights.
At first, the urge to breathe is manageable. Then carbon dioxide builds up in your blood, triggering contractions of the diaphragm—the body's involuntary attempt to force you to inhale. Competitive freedivers learn to work through these contractions, riding them out while their oxygen reserves continue to deplete.
As oxygen levels drop, the body enters what's called the diving reflex. Your heart rate slows dramatically. Blood vessels in your extremities constrict, shunting blood to your core organs. Your spleen contracts, releasing stored red blood cells to carry more oxygen. These adaptations are strongest in people who train regularly—the spleen, in particular, can enlarge significantly in experienced freedivers, becoming a more effective oxygen reservoir.
But the diving reflex can only do so much. Eventually, oxygen drops too low to sustain consciousness, and the freediver blacks out. If they're lucky, they're near the surface and can be rescued. If they're not lucky, they drown.
This is the central risk of the sport: pushing too close to your limits means you might not know you've exceeded them until you wake up—or don't wake up—in the arms of a safety diver.
Underwater Sports
Competitive depth diving is only part of the freediving world. The breath-hold serves as the foundation for an entire ecosystem of underwater sports, most of which are completely unknown to the general public.
Underwater hockey—sometimes called octopush in the United Kingdom—emerged in 1954 when a man named Alan Blake invented it to keep his diving club active during the cold English winters. Players wear fins and snorkels, pushing a weighted puck across the bottom of a pool with small sticks. The sport has spread worldwide; the first World Championship was held in Canada in 1980.
Underwater rugby originated in German diving clubs in the early 1960s as part of physical fitness training. Two teams try to place a negatively buoyant ball—filled with saltwater so it sinks—into goals at the bottom of the pool. Despite the name, it bears almost no resemblance to the land-based sport except for the physical contact.
Underwater football combines elements of both, with players maneuvering a slightly sinking ball from one side of the pool to the other. It's played primarily in Canada, in provinces including Alberta, Manitoba, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Saskatchewan.
And then there's aquathlon, also called underwater wrestling. Two competitors wearing masks and fins try to remove a ribbon from each other's ankle in thirty-second rounds. The sport originated in the Soviet Union in the 1980s—perhaps predictably, given that country's enthusiasm for turning everything into a competitive endeavor.
Synchronized Swimming
The most publicly visible breath-hold sport is synchronized swimming, though few spectators realize just how much breath-holding is involved. Performers execute complex routines upside down underwater, their legs creating patterns in the air while their lungs burn. During lifts, swimmers are not allowed to touch the bottom of the pool—everything must be supported by other swimmers and the water itself.
The sport demands an unusual combination of skills: the cardiovascular endurance of a distance swimmer, the flexibility of a gymnast, the precision of a dancer, and the breath control of a freediver. Traditionally it was women-only, but international competitions began admitting men in 2015, though the Olympics still bars male competitors.
The Risks That Remain
Freediving is safer than it was for those ancient sponge divers, but it is not safe. Every year, experienced practitioners die from shallow water blackout—the phenomenon where dropping oxygen levels cause unconsciousness during the final meters of ascent.
Repetitive deep diving can cause decompression sickness even without compressed air. This seems counterintuitive—nitrogen bubbles should only form when you've been breathing compressed gas—but it happens. The condition is sometimes called taravana, after observations of it among Polynesian pearl divers. The mechanism isn't entirely understood, but the effect is real: dive too deep too many times with too little surface interval, and you risk the same bubble-related injuries as a careless scuba diver.
Cave and spring diving add another layer of danger. Overhead environments—anywhere you can't swim directly to the surface—are perilous for freedivers. A scuba diver who encounters a problem underwater has minutes or hours to solve it. A freediver has perhaps a minute, maybe less. There's no margin for error when your air supply is your lungs.
Why People Do It
With all these risks, why would anyone freedive?
Part of the answer is practical. Recreational freediving—ordinary snorkeling with occasional dives to explore a reef—carries minimal risk and requires almost no equipment. You can walk to a beach, swim out, and spend hours exploring underwater without tanks, regulators, buoyancy compensators, or any of the other paraphernalia of scuba.
Freediving is quiet. Scuba divers announce their presence with streams of bubbles and the mechanical hissing of regulators. Freedivers move through the water in silence, approaching fish and other marine life without startling them away.
And there's something about the simplicity of it—entering the ocean with nothing but your body, propelling yourself downward on a lungful of air, experiencing the strange peace of the deep before kicking back toward the light.
The competitive freedivers, those who push toward the limits of human physiology, speak of meditative states at depth, of a tranquility that comes from total focus on breath and body. The mind quiets. The surface world, with all its complications, fades away. There is only the dive.
For a few minutes—or in the case of Branko Petrović, nearly twelve—nothing else exists.
From Ancient Practice to Modern Sport
The through-line from those Greek sponge divers to today's world-record holders is unbroken. The same physiology that allowed ancient pearl divers to work the Persian Gulf allows modern athletes to descend past two hundred meters. The skandalopetra weights that ancient divers used have evolved into sophisticated sleds, but the principle remains: gravity pulls you down, and your breath determines whether you make it back up.
What's changed is everything around it. We understand the mammalian diving reflex now. We can measure blood oxygen and carbon dioxide levels, study the spleen's response to training, analyze the physics of pressure and compression. We've built hyperbaric chambers for treating the injuries that result from pushing too deep. We've established safety protocols and rescue techniques.
But the fundamental challenge is the same one that faced a diver descending toward a shipwreck off the coast of Greece two thousand years ago: you have one breath, and the surface is a long way up.
Some things technology can't change.