The biggest stars were Alexey and Natalia, and Goran Colak, who traveled to Sardinia in a chartered minivan with the Croatian team—the only squad to bring its own masseuse. They’d need him, after a ferry schedule change had extended what was supposed to be a sixteen-hour road and boat trip into a thirty-hour ordeal. Goran could have passed on the van ride and met his teammates in Sardinia if he’d wanted. Hell, he could have flown first class. For the last two years he’d defeated Alexey in the Static competition hosted by the prince of Dubai, called the Fazza Freediving Championship, winning the Range Rover, while Alexey took home the Nissan Versa. Both times Goran sold the Range and pocketed over 100,000 euros. He’d also broken his own Dynamic world record the year before in Belgrade with a swim of 281 meters. In Croatia, each freediving world record and gold medal comes with a cash bonus from the Ministry of Sports. Goran has stockpiled golds. The Michael Phelps of pool apnea, he’s the only freediver ever to win the individual world title in each of the three pool disciplines, and he won them all in the same year. Overall he’s won five individual gold medals, two silvers, and one bronze, has made a six-figure annual salary for years, and his only job is to train.
Most athletes are self-funded, however, and though several countries subsidized their athletes’ trip to Sardinia, the majority were either freediving instructors, like Mike, or well-paid professionals, like Kerry Hollowell. They were extremely fit but not exactly young. The vast majority were over thirty, some over forty. Among them were engineers, architects, and marine biologists as well as landscapers and roofers. One of the English freedivers worked for the left-wing ocean conservation group Sea Shepherd. Alexey and Natalia ran their own freediving business in Moscow, a thousand kilometers from the sea.
Then fifty-two, Natalia Molchanova was the Martina Navratilova of freediving. An ageless wonder, she’d proven impossible to beat for nearly a decade. Her quiet nature and Eastern bloc heritage, like Navratilova at the peak of her powers, often led to her being misperceived as cold and calculating, when in reality she was the open-hearted Zen poet of her sport. Better yet, the Mother Superior. Her fellow athletes called her the Queen, because she kicked everyone’s ass, and did it with love.
Natalia was born in Ufa, a southern Russian city founded as a sixteenth-century fort on orders from Ivan the Terrible and set on the banks of three different rivers. It was there that she first fell in love with swimming. She swam breaststroke competitively through school, competing at the highest levels until she met her future husband, another athlete, at a swim meet when she was just twenty years old. After university, like all Soviet students, the couple was obligated to teach in small towns to pay the country back for their free education. The Molchanovs were stationed in Marx, a little town near Engels.
Three years later her husband got a job in a Volgograd shipyard, and Natalia soon had two kids. Alexey was her youngest. She swam with him in her arms when he was still an infant and by the time he was just three years old, he was swimming for distance. Once a year they would travel to the Black Sea to dive for mussels. By then Natalia had become a swim coach and a teacher, and life was good. They even managed to weather the storm of the Soviet collapse. “It was hard,” said Alexey, who was five years old at the time. “I remember there was no food in the shops, no clothes or shoes in the stores, but we managed.” Mostly because Natalia hustled to make sure the family’s basic needs were met.
In 2001, when Alexey was thirteen and Natalia was thirty-nine, they weathered another storm. Alexey’s father had met another woman—another Natalia—and fallen in love. She was twenty years old. Natalia had given everything to this man, and now he’d traded her in for a new model, like she was disposable. The separation was tough on Alexey, but it also bound him closer to his mother, who soon left Volgograd and settled in Moscow. A year later, in 2002, she read about freediving in a magazine, and it sounded healing. She looked for somewhere to learn, but there were no freediving schools in Moscow. So she started one herself.
Natalia read all she could about the sport, and launched a freediving program at Moscow’s Russian State University of Physical Education, Sport, Youth and Tourism, one of the old Soviet-era sports universities, which used to churn out Olympic champions. She eventually became an associate professor there. By 2003 she had already snagged a Russian record and tied the world record in Dynamic with a swim of 155 meters. In the ocean she was still relatively shallow, though. Her personal best was a mere 45 meters.
The next year she began collecting world records in the pool, but pool diving wasn’t what she loved the most. “Compared to the ocean, the pool is like running on a treadmill versus running in the forest,” she said. She’d always bring Alexey to competitions, and the two of them would train for depth in Dahab, which remains a vital training center for the Russian Freediving Federation thanks to ample depth and the four-hour nonstop flights to Moscow. Of all her many early freedives there, she can recall one special journey, in Dahab’s Blue Hole, that fundamentally shifted her relationship to her sport.
There is a famous underwater red rock arch in Dahab, which is more like a 25-meter long tunnel, and is an extreme challenge to swim through. When a diver submerges to 53 meters, swims the length of that tunnel and makes it back to the surface unscathed, they know they are among the elite. “I have a big experience inside when I go through the arch,” Natalia said. And her “big experience” led to an epiphany that true power in freediving comes from a deep relaxation that feels like surrender. She tried to explain: “Freediving is not only sport, it’s a way to understand who we are. When we go down if we don’t think, we understand we are whole. We are one with world. When we think we are separate. On surface it is natural to think and we have many information inside. We need to reset sometimes, freediving helps do that.”
None of the young men in Dahab could keep up with her that day. They hadn’t the courage or ability to make it through. Few athletes worldwide had the chops back then, or do now, but she was so relaxed it was easy, and when she breached the surface she knew she would try for the world record at the 2005 world championship. She achieved it with a Constant Weight dive of 86 meters. Thus began Natalia’s period of complete domination through total surrender.
In 2012, when she took back the Constant No Fins record from Ashley, she did it on her fiftieth birthday, for herself but also as a lesson to older athletes everywhere. “Many people, when they reach fifty, they think life is over,” she said. “I want to show them, there is more they can do.” In 2013, at fifity-one, she broke all six world records, and her Constant Weight mark of 101 meters made her the only woman to swim below 100 meters in the sport’s history.
As Natalia began to dominate, Alexey also progressed, and like his mother, he set his first world record in the pool in 2008 with a Dynamic swim of 250 meters. He had trouble with persistent blackouts in Constant Weight in his early years, so he slowed his progression and stopped making big jumps in depth; by 2011 his patience paid off when he had a shot at winning the Constant Weight world championship. Unfortunately, he’d trained too hard in the lead-up and lost motor control at the surface after his dive to 118 meters. If he’d had a clean surface protocol, he would have won the title. Instead, Guillaume Néry of France took gold. The next year, in 2012, Alexey broke his first depth world record with a Constant Weight dive to 125 meters in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.
Although Natalia always had faith in Alexey’s ability, she often felt tortured watching him dive, as time ticked on, suspense set in, and her son remained cloaked in blue. “Many times I’m nervous,” she said. The most stressful moment came on Alexey’s world record 128-meter dive in 2013. Less than a week before, he’d had a deep-water blackout and a bad lung squeeze. She begged him to quit the competition. “He don’t listen me. I’m nervous, of course, but I must not show it. I nervous only inside. Outside I’m quiet because it’s important for Alosha [her pet name for Alexey].”
Although they’d been among the best in the sport for y
ears, Natalia never considered either of them to be professional athletes. “I am not professional sportsman,” she said. “I have not money from sport. I haven’t sponsor. Me and Alosha work as teachers. We are instructors. We work.” There’s never been any doubt about that. In fact, Alexey is arguably the hardest-working man in freediving.
He and his mother ran the Russian Freediving Federation out of the same Moscow university where Natalia had worked for years. Its marble halls are lined with sports memorabilia from yesteryear: wooden skis, snowshoes, tennis rackets, and basketball jerseys. A new exhibit recognizes Russian medal winners from the Sochi Olympics, and in the water sports wing, several of Natalia’s trophies, photographs, and books are on display.
Natalia had written a handful of instructional manuals, which she and Alexey used in their freediving classes, as well as a volume of poetry. She also lectured at the university, and commuted from her simple but comfortable one-bedroom high-rise apartment on a motorized kick scooter. Unlike her son, who drove his souped-up Honda Accord on Moscow’s three-ring roads like a Bangkok cabbie on speed, she was always too timid to drive. They lived less than a block away from one another in a neighborhood of midcentury high-rises. Hers was a bit more chic than his apartment, which was cramped, with wood floors and a smallish kitchen and living area. His mattress rested on the bedroom floor. Spent protein-powder barrels were lined up in a hedgerow on his dresser. Not that he clocked much time there. He’s usually on the road competing or training in Dahab.
When in town, he could be found by his mother’s side at the university’s vast, yet aging natatorium, where they ran their freediving school and the Russian Freediving Federation out of their office behind two black-bottomed, Olympic-sized pools. Next door to the office was their storeroom, stocked with over a hundred monofins that Alexey designed, beta tested, and had manufactured in Siberia for customers in Russia and overseas.
Nobody built the sport like Alexey and Natalia, whose sixty-odd instructors each taught a dozen or more students every week at four different pools scattered around the city. They held training camps in Dahab and Bali, and Natalia and Alexey still taught newcomers, who crammed their office two dozen at a time, relishing the chance to learn from the very best. They should. They might as well have been learning how to serve from Roger Federer and Serena Williams.
While Natalia was a born teacher, her son preferred to focus on the business side. He stayed busy fielding orders or stocking dive shops in Egypt and across Russia with Molchanova gear. He also handled the money, collecting soggy and wrinkled checks from new faces in class. Each one made his eyes twinkle. Alexey may have been born into socialism, but he’d become a shameless capitalist who took business calls at all hours from his Bluetooth earpiece and emailed students, customers, and suppliers deep into the night.
In some ways mother and son were similar. Both had muscular lower halves, their thighs and calves bulging, and were stoked with an inner competitive fire. But while Alexey was gregarious, Natalia was shy. He loved buying new tech, and wore designer jeans and bespoke sandals from Italy. She couldn’t have cared less about shopping. He did all the driving, of course, and could be bombastic, talking about new records to break and competitions to win. She rarely discussed competitive goals, instead waxing wistfully about how nice it would be if Alexey would just forget about all of this world record business, settle down, and have a family like his sister.
When Natalia talked about freediving, it was always about the soul of the sport. “In training, is very important to dive for pleasure inside. To feel pleasure. In training, I never push,” she said. “It’s big problem to be fanatic sportsman, and think about only result. Life is not only sport. Life is more. So if we concentrate on the result and become fanatic, we don’t feel our body and we push our body. The biggest problem with freedivers now is they hurry. They go too deep too fast. That is the problem with Nicholas. In all other sports they start young and there are levels. You start at the first level and go up. But freedivers are adults, and they don’t want to start at the beginning level. They think, I’m strong, I can do, but no. This is what Nicholas did.”
Alexey agreed. When he started out, it was common for competitive freedivers to build to 80 meters over the course of eight years. “It took me two years to get to 80 meters, and that was already fast,” he said. Natalia believed that because she and Alexey took their time, their bodies were better adapted to depth. She hypothesized that their blood vessels and rib cage were more flexible, which allowed them to withstand intense barometric pressure.
“I think Nicholas started very quickly,” Natalia said. “He was talented sportsman of course, but his body was not ready for big depth because the body needs adaptation. [Eighteen months] is very big speed for 100 meters. His blood vessel don’t adapt. He was not flexible because he hadn’t time.”
Alexey and Natalia obviously weren’t afraid of pushing their limits. They trained in the pool and the gym for two hours almost every day, and they never trained alone because their popular freediving school delivered a talent pool stocked with training partners to their doorstep. The best of them tried out for the national team in July 2012, when Alexey and Natalia hosted team trials at the university.
Alexey’s longtime girlfriend, Marina, made the cut, though they had recently split. Marianna Krupnitskaya, a recent college grad, posted an impressive Dynamic dive, earning a spot. So did Andrey Matveenko, Alexey’s weightlifting buddy. Once tall and scrawny, he’d put on thirty pounds of muscle in the past two years and become Russia’s second-deepest man. His progress got Alexey’s attention, and the two began weight training together.
Sasha, the diver who red carded in Sardinia, already booked his spot when he beat Goran at a recent pool comp with a Dynamic dive of 265 meters, breaking Alexey’s national record along the way. Seeing his record broken didn’t concern Alexey, because thanks to Sasha, the Russian men had a team capable of winning gold for the first time, or so he thought.
After trials, Natalia gathered the group at the pool’s edge, a stopwatch dangling from her neck. She praised the newbies who came out to experience a competitive environment for the first time and talked about safe ways of approaching and moving beyond limits. Her greatness and her softness made her a leader easy to follow.
Sometimes she led by example—like when she dove to 93 meters in Sardinia, making her the third-deepest diver in the entire tournament, men included. Like Alexey, she prepared by breathing up vertically on the line, dressed in the Russian women’s custom gold wetsuits. As time ticked down, she stretched her neck in one direction, then the next, arched her back, and expanded her chest. With twenty seconds to go she began packing air, sipping forty packs before putting her face in the water and kicking down. Her descent was a little slow, but she surfaced at 3:29, right on time. As she hooked the line, she let out a sunny laugh, the tag dangling from her finger like a toy ring. No wonder they called her the Queen. With another white card secured, after a strong showing in Static on day one, the Russian women were in control.
Other times she took a more active leadership role. Like when Sasha red carded. According to Natalia, he didn’t slip into the water with a clean mind. The problem: Marianna and Sasha, who had a live-in girlfriend, started to hook up during their training camp in Croatia. But Sasha would bring that same girlfriend, one of Moscow’s best pole dancers, with him to Sardinia. He was caught between two women. It was not going well.
But Russia caught a break when Croatian Bruno Segvic, who had hit 100 meters in training, blacked out after a 92-meter dive. He fell backward and thrashed in the water before going limp for ten seconds. Though it certainly looked dramatic, it was a simple loss of motor control and a brief blackout, but it changed everything. Thanks to Alexey’s heroic 120-meter dive and Andrey’s 90-meter jaunt right afterward, the Russian men were back in the mix for gold as long as Sasha nailed his 81-meter dive. If he slipped up again, however, they could kiss even bronze goodbye.
Natalia shadowed Sasha as he floated to the line, looking for redemption. She whispered in his ear, reminding him to focus on “deconcentration,” one of Natalia’s fundamental principles of freediving. When the diver relaxes deeply, and lets the world as it is fade into white noise until all that matters is one breath, one stroke at a time. But he can’t get too loose or too soft. He must stay in the moment and allow his training, his habits, and muscle memory to take over.
As the countdown began, Sasha looked over to Natalia, who beamed with motherly pride, love, and confidence, as if she were communicating the vital truth that his problems didn’t exist in the water. Nothing existed except Sasha and the line. He relaxed his shoulders, packed fifty sips of air, inflated his lungs to the zenith, adjusted his mask, and went down. His pace was swift. Within twenty seconds he’d passed 25 meters. Thirty seconds later he was at 60 meters and dropping fast. Once at the bottom he turned and kicked back hard. Two minutes after his dive had begun he was already past 50 meters, swimming toward blades of Mediterranean sun that pierced the blue like a sundial. All was well in his world when he rose up, grabbed the line, and aced the surface protocol. He coughed a bit, but there was no blood and no drama, other than that love triangle awaiting him on shore.
Love problems didn’t interfere with Marianna or Marina, who had spent a month in tears after Alexey left her, but pulled herself together to represent her country. Both nailed their Constant Weight dives and the Russian women continued to build their lead over Team Japan, looking for their third straight gold behind Tomoka Fukuda, Hanako Hirose, and Misuzu Okamoto. Mike’s dive seemed to go reasonably well, though he was penalized a couple of points for not letting go of the line before dipping his face in the water, but afterward he coughed, spit in his hand, and found specks of blood. He washed his palm in the sea, and spat again. More blood. Not too much, but it was there.
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