…to be kind to myself…to allow the performance to be an expression of my being and not define what my being is.
That evening he and Iru made batch after batch of arepas. She grilled and flipped them in a tiny pan on his butane burner. They left the door open, salsa blasting from the laptop speakers. Whoever passed by, hotel staff or athlete, would be called in to try an arepa stuffed with stolen and store-bought treats. He also made a pot of lentils, utilizing his trusty stash of spices he always smuggled into foreign lands, and they poured beer and wine. It wasn’t the typical precomp meal, but it felt like good medicine. He’d already made his dive announcement for the following day. He would pull back a little rather than push his edge. Iru did the same. She would turn early, but Nick found his dive easy and it was the most successful he’d ever be on a world championship stage.
Some of that had to do with his late-night conversation with Grant Graves, one of the AIDA judges in Kalamata. Grant had become a consigliere for Nick over the past year. He’d dish out training tips and they’d discuss Nick’s psychological blocks. Grant was one of the longest-tenured judges and coaches in the sport, and from his first dive in the Caymans the year before he had seen something special in Nick and, like Will, envisioned a day when he might challenge for world records. Before he went to sleep that night, Nick found Grant and told him about Bojana, and how much he’d been suffering. Grant listened and offered a nugget of wisdom that would help him in the water.
“The perfect dive isn’t about how deep you go, and it’s not about suppressing your pain,” Grant said. “It’s about finding those spaces between the thoughts, where you can live purely in the moment. That’s easier underwater than on the surface, believe me. That’s what I want you to work on tomorrow.”
The Individual Depth World Championship surpassed Nice in scope. There were platforms for each of the three competition lines, a larger platform, which was the athletes’ dry area, and three warm-up lines tethered to surface buoys. The event felt big, but Nick’s announced dive of 65 meters was still shallow enough to make him feel anonymous. With no countrymen in the water, and no national record anticipation in the air, he could become the blank everyman. A happy ant, one of the many breathing up and dropping down, before the stars shined bright. He knew that six other athletes would dive deeper than he would, including Will Trubridge, and he wasn’t even attempting a personal best. He had exceeded 65 meters in training. He was diving because that’s what he loved to do. The dive itself would be his pause between thoughts, his respite of peace in the midst of pain.
His dive was as vanilla as he hoped. Unspectacular and uneventful, but the aftermath was not. After earning his white card, he caught the first zodiac back to the hotel and relaxed with coffee, chatting with Tanc over Facebook. Frenchman Thomas Bouchard was next on the line after Nick. He was headed to 68 meters, but turned at 64, so Nick was officially still in first place by the time he got home. Next up were a Ukrainian and two Danes who planned to go to 71, 71, and 74 meters, respectively. But the Ukrainian turned at 41 meters, and the first Dane turned early as well.
“Dude, one more penalty and you’re on the podium,” Tanc wrote. Nick didn’t believe him. When Stig Pryds, the second Dane, blacked out at the surface, Nick was guaranteed at least bronze. Tanc told him so. In fact, Nick was in contention for gold until Morgan Bourc’his, of France, took the no fins lead with a clean dive to 87 meters. Nick still wouldn’t buy it.
William Trubridge was the last serious contender of the day. He’d announced 96 meters, when an announcement of 88 would have won gold. Nick understood why. It was the world championship and it didn’t just matter that you won, it mattered how you won. When Will blacked out, too hypoxic to get through the surface protocol after making it to the plate and back, Nick couldn’t celebrate, partly because Will was his friend, and also because in his mind, a 65-meter dive shouldn’t have earned him a silver medal.
The Constant No Fins comp in Kalamata was rife with blackouts and red cards—there were ten on the men’s side alone, but there were also quite a few squeezes among those who were awarded white cards. Jakob Galbavy of Austria, who came in fourth that day with a dive of 61 meters, remembers seeing a slick of blood on the surface while he was warming up, and the problem only got worse three days later during the Constant Weight competition when another diver described watching spoonfuls of blood dissipating in the current.
Steve Keenan remembers it well. He was a safety diver from the mini-comp through the six training days and on each of the three competition days, too. “There was quite a bit of squeezing there,” he said, “and very little surveillance or screening. The athletes would come out on the boat, hit the lines, get back on the boat, and be back on the beach and gone. It was up to them really if they wanted to [get examined by a doctor].” He remembers one French diver who asked to be checked out and a member of the safety team accompanied him to the hospital, but if the divers kept it to themselves the organizers, judges, and competition doctor wouldn’t pursue it.
In a competition with arguably the most significant squeeze problems in AIDA history, not one diver was disqualified from competition for medical reasons. Athletes were pushing themselves to the limit, injuring their lungs and coughing up blood, and nobody batted an eye. “I have to admit that at the time, I wasn’t massively concerned,” Steve said. “I have to admit—myself, as I was training to go deeper, I had quite a few squeezes. Chasing numbers, basically.”
Nobody was chasing a bigger number in Kalamata than Alexey Molchanov. The day after his squeeze, he felt tension on each inhale. The deeper he breathed, the more he felt it, but there was no more blood. He’d told Goran Colak what had happened, and he suggested Alexey do four 15-minute sessions a day on oxygen to aid recovery. It worked. When he woke up the following morning the tension in his chest was gone; later that day, he was back in the water. There wasn’t a medical protocol in place, so Alexey didn’t need to seek clearance from a doctor, but his mother was beside herself with worry.
“I say to him, stop competition for you, and for me too. We go. Not important this competition,” Natalia said. Alexey wouldn’t budge.
“If you don’t want to dive, you can go,” he said, “but I want to compete.”
Alexey’s first dive after the accident was just 45 meters. He wanted to make sure his lungs could withstand the pressure, and he came up clean. “I felt pain in the ligaments and muscles around the rib cage, but the lungs were fine,” he said. The next day he pushed to 75 meters, and felt normal. In his mind the only question left was how deep to push. Should he just try to win gold, or should he break the record and shock the world? On September 18, five days after his squeeze and the night before the Constant Weight competition, he announced 128 meters, sending ripples of shock and concern through the freediving community.
“Considering the depth and what was involved to do something like that [six] days later,” Steve said, “none of us could believe he was doing it again.”
Calm seas weren’t a problem on September 19, 2013. The Mediterranean was choppy and the temperature had dropped 2°C/5°F. Half of the athletes would turn early that day, Nick included, but no matter how frustrated they may have been, they forgot themselves when Alexey was in the water. His dive was the talk of the tournament.
In his gold hooded suit, he breathed up on the line as the announcer ticked the minutes and seconds down to his top time. “I was a bit more nervous for sure,” Alexey said. “I was worried about my ability to withstand hypoxia and I knew that my fitness level dropped because my body had exhausted resources for recovery instead of preserving them to compete, but I knew if I would focus on that, I’d lose.” Instead, Alexey pretended that the bad dive never happened and tuned in to the weeks leading up to Kalamata, when he’d been making incredible progress, going deeper and getting stronger with each swim. “When you do repetitive deep dives in training, you get this level of confidence, and I was able to get it back during the dive.”
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His entry was crisp, his kicks elegant, smooth, and powerful, the Mediterranean a perfect blue. He was at the plate before two minutes had elapsed, grabbed the line with his left hand and the tag with his right and in two seconds was swimming back to the surface. That was the hard part, swimming against the pressure with nitrogen narcosis reverberating and twisting his brain. Diving deep, day after day, builds tolerance to narcosis, but he’d had several days off, and got a full dose. He willed himself to ignore the madness nipping at his synapses, and kept kicking.
As he approached the 10-meter mark, his form began to slip. His dolphin kick broke down, and instead of undulating his upper body and snapping his hips, he looked like a stunned rocking horse. His pace slowed to a crawl. Once again he started circling the line. Luckily he was positively buoyant, and the elements were pushing him to the surface despite himself. Steve was certain he would black out, and he might have if he hadn’t accidentally bumped the line with his forehead.
“It kind of woke him up,” Steve said. “He was far from clean, but he made it.” At the surface he took his time, taking five hook breaths before removing his nose clip and running through that bumpy protocol, which nearly brought a protest from Will. White card. Alexey had come to Kalamata to win gold and break his record, and he’d done both, overcoming the worst injury of his career along the way.
The moral of the story for those in attendance, including Nick, was one of superior will, supreme athleticism, and natural talent, but there were implicit messages too. That diving on a squeeze can’t kill you. That bloody lungs heal fast, and that if an athlete wants a record bad enough, has trained hard enough, and has some God-given talent, it’s best to tune out the negative chatter, prove everyone wrong, and go get it.
Alexey and Will were the stars in Kalamata. Will took silver in Constant Weight and gold in Free Immersion with a dive to 115 meters. Alexey also won silver in Free Immersion, while Nick turned early yet again, but he’d already earned his bling. At the award ceremony America’s only athlete stepped onto the podium, bowed his head, and accepted his medal, but it didn’t make him happy. At the closing party, Nick found Grant at the bar and slipped silver into his pocket. “You deserve this more than I do,” he said, before drifting into the shadows.
Iru and Nick collided later that night, as well, and it wasn’t pretty. He kept circling while she danced with Johnny Sunnex. He wanted to cut in, but she was weary of his antics. She didn’t like that he seemed ungrateful for his medal or that he was continually leading her on, and most of all she was pissed off about Bojana. Someone else finally told her why he’d been so sad. She didn’t have all the details, but she’d heard enough. In her mind, if he didn’t want to be her lover, he should have at least been a friend and told her everything. She demanded he keep his distance. She was through being his consolation prize.
She tried to leave Kalamata without saying goodbye, but he showed up at her door the next morning with an armful of gifts, set them down, and gave her another bear hug. Nick was dramatic, hilarious, stubborn, troubled, and passionate. Just like her. They didn’t have the love affair she’d hoped for, but they loved each other all the same. She stood there, limp, arms at her side, while he held her. Until she gave in and hugged him back tight enough to feel better.
“I’m glad I did,” she said, “because that’s the last time we saw each other.”
Nick was back in Brooklyn for less than twenty-four hours before he had to leave again. Barely enough time to do laundry and pack for the tropics. He was on his way to Curacao for Deja Blue 2013, then Long Island, where he and Johnny Sunnex would assist Will Trubridge’s upcoming freediving class and enjoy weeks of training in Dean’s Blue Hole. There wasn’t time to see friends, so he didn’t tell anybody he was stopping through, besides Denny. She’d become his de facto assistant, cold calling public pools across the country, trying to find places that would allow Nick and Goran to teach freediving classes on their upcoming cross-country road trip. Goran was flying out in January, and their trip promised to satisfy both halves of Nick: the bohemian rambler and the serious athlete. It would also be the first step into his new career as an instructor.
When Denny showed up, he gave her a bottle of Greek olive oil as a thank-you gift, and they hung out on his rooftop. It was nighttime, a crescent moon hung low in the sky, and a light breeze kicked up from the East River. Nick was backlit by streetlights as he sat on the ledge facing Denny, who stood, leaning only slightly on her cane.
One of Nick’s favorite things about Denny was the way she could chew a fanciful, philosophical straw to the nub. Once she talked about how much more fun it would be if she could tell time with bouquets of flowers. “Think about it,” she’d told him. “Instead of saying I’m twenty-one years old, I could say I’m 1,372 bouquets old.”
This time she had a more serious topic on her mind. She’d begun taking a cutting edge MS drug, Tysabri, over the summer. It was her first time taking medication, and it was working. Her vision had drastically improved, her pain had subsided, and she could move better than she had in years. Slowly, she was becoming herself again. One problem: Tysabri made her susceptible to a rare, deadly, and incurable brain infection known as the PML virus. Within the first year there would be a 1 in 1,000 chance that she’d get PML, which was essentially a death sentence. After two years, there would be a 1 in 333 chance, and after four years on the medication, it could be as high as 1 in 76. If she were to quit the medication, however, her symptoms would most likely return. Hell, they might come back anyway. MS is vicious like that.
Denny, feeling her mortality, explained the risks and rewards, her improvement, and her fear; then they sat in silence while her mind conjured the image of a bonfire at summer camp when she was a teenager. She remembered an old tree stump reduced to glowing embers, transitioning from yellow to orange to red with hints of blue, purple, and white in between. Dead wood was the canvas for the entire spectrum as it was consumed by its own beautiful destruction. She painted the picture for him. He nodded and smiled.
“Wouldn’t it be great to be consumed by a passion?” she asked. “To be short lived, but to have given it your all?” She was thinking about her own choice. Whether to endure blows from a fucked-up disease or to go out standing, with balled fists and full faculties. “Do you think it would be worth it?” He stared at her, as he flashed to his own quest for records still unbroken, for the life he longed to live, perhaps forgetting that he was already on the path. His penetrating eyes made her momentarily shy. “Don’t listen to me,” she said. “I’m just being silly and stupid.”
“It’s not silly,” he said. “It’s not stupid. It’s profound, and you know it.”
—
HE WAS A latecomer to Deja Blue, forgoing the two weeks of training before the event and landing just in time to compete. His connecting flight had been delayed, so he drank beers and watched baseball in an airport lounge and didn’t land in Curacao until 11 p.m. He’d already messaged in his dive announcement, and when he woke up that morning he learned he’d be the deepest diver of the day, and the first man in the water. This time he hadn’t had the time to bond with the other athletes, and few of his friends were there. He wasn’t part of the tribe, but an outlier, the rock star silver medalist and American record holder. The natural. His 90-meter dive was clean and easy. He blew everyone away.
Two days later he hit 68 meters in Constant No Fins. Again he was clean, and he felt so good that he high-fived Kirk Krack after completing the protocol. That was a violation. Divers aren’t supposed to touch anybody within that thirty-second window after surfacing. When the red card came, he flipped out. He punched the water and screamed. He climbed onto the dry boat and started kicking things. Someone tried to console him. “Don’t talk to me!” he shouted. For an hour he pouted and steamed, and then he was calm again. He felt terrible and made his round of apologies. Kirk included, but the damage was done.
Nick dominated the rest of the competition. He did
another 65-meter Constant No Fins dive, and got to 75 meters in Free Immersion. His pool numbers were solid and he won gold. With over a month to train on Long Island before Vertical Blue, he was in perfect position to close the season on a high note.
Before he left Curacao, however, he had to sit down with Kirk. He’d been in the midst of the PFI teacher training course and was hoping to complete it and get certified before he left the island. Kirk had him run through a lecture, which could have been tighter, but it was his antics in the water that gave Kirk pause.
He didn’t certify Nick. In their final meeting Kirk encouraged Nick to reconnect with his love for freediving. “If you find that enjoyment again then when you hit the numbers, that will just be the cherry on top.” Nick nodded and listened. He knew Kirk was right, and Kirk had left the door open for him to refine his teaching skills and eventually get certified, but he would have to shift his relationship to the sport. “I don’t care how good you are,” Kirk told him, “you need to walk the walk.”
Nick arrived in Long Island for the last time on October 13, moving into a split-level house on a hill with Johnny Sunnex. The digs were small but stunning, with wood floors, an open floor plan, and two bedrooms, one upstairs and one down. Not to mention a wide terrace with spectacular, 180-degree views of a turquoise lagoon sheltered by barrier islands and the deep blue Atlantic Ocean beyond. The pair cooked, trained, and worked together, and the more time they spent, the more common ground they found.
Both were products of tough childhoods. Johnny, trim and chiseled at five feet ten with wavy, shoulder-length hair, was from a poor town in rural New Zealand, thirty minutes from the coast. “Most people aspire to work in the frozen food factory,” he said. “If you get a good trade behind you, like an electrician, you’re doing pretty well.” That’s what Johnny did and it was his ticket out. He ended up working in Australian mines and, like Nick, making great money for a young kid with no college degree, but it wasn’t fulfilling. Between mining gigs, he’d travel and ended up a dive master at a scuba shop on the Great Barrier Reef, practicing freediving in his spare time. Eventually he’d travel to Ko Tao for a class from Christina Saenz de Santamaria, the 2014 Caribbean Cup champion, and her husband Eusebio.
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