Diving to the Top

At 34, Alexey Molchanov has broken almost every freediving record there is and, in doing so, challenged assumptions about the limits of human endeavour. But after an unimaginable loss, he has also found escape within the ocean's depths. His story is a lesson in how to turn risk-taking into recovery-making.

- By Sami Emory

At 1.8m tall and nearly 86kg, 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.

Molchanov 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 that he plans to hold for nearly four minutes underwater. His target: a metal ring lined with white tags, suspended at the seemingly impossible-to-reach depth of 130m. That's a round trip roughly equivalent to two and a half football fields. His goal is to grab a tag and 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 Molchanov'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 a dive line, or weights, or even hitched to a heavy sled. Today's event, known as constant weight, is Molchanov's speciality, and while most divers wear a weight belt to aid their descent, he relies solely on the weight of his monofin and his powerful, merman-style kick.