Unlike the lithe, wetsuited mermen and women in The Deepest Breath, the newly released documentary, frustration was the main note of my first experience of freediving at sea. It was another eternal Mediterranean morning and – in a region off the coast of France near Montpellier where the sediment from the Rhône often clouds the waters – there was even a little visibility down below.
But try as I might, I couldn’t get beyond the surface water to break into the big blue below. As soon as I descended more than five or six metres, I was no longer able to blow air through to my left ear and equalise it to the growing pressure of the water around it. Any further down and it was like someone jamming a sharp pencil into my ear canal.
Freediving as a sport is also trying to push through to greater realms. Long a marginal activity – supposedly for masochists who enjoy flirting with the perils of sudden blackouts at depth – it has been steadily growing over the past decade and is now having a bit of cultural moment. Popular science books such as James Nestor’s Deep and Adam Skolnick’s One Breath have begun to initiate general audiences into this aquatic cult, helped by the wellness-influenced interest in breathwork, promoted by the likes of Wim Hof.
The cast of Avatar: The Way of Water enjoyed showing off their breath-hold personal bests on the film’s publicity run, with Kate Winslet apparently achieving an astounding seven minutes 14 seconds. Now the critically lionised The Deepest Breath – a shattering love story involving the recordbreaking Italian freediver Alessia Zecchini and her partner, the Irish safety diver Stephen Keenan, which culminated in a tragic accident in Dahab, Egypt in 2017 – is giving freediving what it is probably its highest-profile break of recent years.
To pull in mainstream crowds, however, freediving will first need to address its foreboding reputation – and whether its core appeal lies as competitive sport or something more spiritual. The sport is self-evidently dangerous: Nestor’s Deep states that the annual fatality rate for recreational (rather than competitive) freediving is roughly one death for every 500 participants, compared to one in 60 for Base jumpers and one in 1,000,000 for mountain climbers.
The Deepest Breath director, Laura McGann, was new to freediving when she read about Zecchini and Keenan but came to believe that the risks shouldn’t necessarily hamper its wider uptake: “Everyone takes part in their own way, and as [champion freediver] William Trubridge has said, the slower you do it the better,” she told me.
“There is a competitive element, but at competitions safety is taken really seriously. It’s constantly evolving and becoming more robust. Everyone is an adult, and knows the risks and mitigates them.”
If she is right, then could freediving still feasibly make the leap that surfing did into the mainstream from the 1960s onwards? Deeply embedded into the counterculture, surfing arguably started from a larger base, yet surely freediving has potential for wider participation. After all, everyone starts out in life doing it. As my old coach, Jeff Coulais, puts it: “Our first training in apnea [breath-holding] lasts nine months.”
In the past, freediving had a pragmatic purpose: for food or commerce. Cultures from Greek sponge divers to Polynesian pearl divers to the ama fisherwomen of Japan have trained their bodies to delve downwards on a single breath. The nomadic Bajau people of south-east Asia, who have collected shellfish from the sea floor for thousands of years, have evolved to have spleens 50% larger than average – the organ stores oxygenated red blood cells, allowing for longer dives.
Photograph: Matjaz Corel/Alamy
It was only in the 20th century that freediving started to enter the arena of sport and leisure in Europe. In 1949, the Italian fighter pilot and spearfisher Raimondo Bucher established the first official freediving depth record: 30 metres in the Gulf of Naples. The great Sicilian diver Enzo Maiorca broke the 50-metre barrier in 1961. But it was the Frenchman Jacques Mayol who began to shift freediving in a more spiritual direction.
Born in Shanghai, he incorporated yoga and Zen meditation into his preparation, and in 1976 became the first person to breach 100 metres, using a special sled to descend. His intense rivalry with Maiorca was rhapsodised by Luc Besson in the 1988 film The Big Blue, which ushered in a new generation of divers. Until then, freediving had been outflanked in popularity by scuba diving, but the sheer beauty of how Besson’s epic captured freediving’s unique mix of exhilaration and tranquillity helped redress the balance.
***
I decided Zen sounded good, too, and for a few years following my discouraging first descent I concentrated on what the French call “static apnea”: holding your breath in water while stationary. From the outside, it looks absurd: you bob face-down in the pool, waiting for the muscular contractions in the chest, back and throat (caused by accumulating carbon dioxide in the bloodstream) to begin.
From the inside, it’s a revelation – a way of observing and understanding minute physiological responses – and slowly, if the time is right, sliding into a state of amniotic meditation. People, when I tell them about it, seem incredulous that I can hold my breath for four minutes. But this is achievable for almost anyone.
One friend puts his finger on it as I’m describing this introspective practice in which we learn how to breathe, all the better to stop breathing: “It’s French existentialist swimming!”
My first teacher in static apnea was Coulais, a one-time world record-holder for the quickest time swimming 150 metres underwater with fins. He says that freediving’s time has come. “For me, it’s the sport of the 21st century,” he told me.
“In today’s world, people aren’t necessarily finding what they want in the external world. They need to return back to themselves. And how better than to breathe or learn how to breathe?”
Coulais sees freediving as an antidote to the pressures of late-stage capitalism: “We’re living in a world of competition. From school onwards, we’re forced to be number one. And what does being number one mean? You have to demonstrate you can go further, stronger, faster. That’s bullshit.”
He thinks that competition should not be the priority for freediving, but rather acquiring self-knowledge about the interaction of body and mind that leads to enhanced stress management – and, in its own time, better performance.
“When we practice apnea, it’s not about survival, about absolute control. It’s about being alive,” he says. “You have to learn in the present moment – it’s more about letting go than control.”
The Deepest Breath shows exactly this moment of transition when Zecchini, previously a talented but distance-obsessed diver and a perennial runner-up, finally learns to enjoy herself during dives – and finds that her performances plummet (in a good way). This is the one moment where the film, which otherwise feeds off freediving’s competition side for its drama, manages to nail one of the sport’s psychological intricacies. For all of the abyssal beauty captured by McGann, the interior aspect is intrinsically resistant to being put on film – yet that is where the biggest potential gains for freediving lie, in promoting greater wellbeing.
Very few people will reach 100 metres, but the mental benefits are open to all. The sport could even serve as a spiritual touchstone akin to the “soul-surfing” philosophy that shunned big-wave chasing in favour of surfing the ocean as a source of connectedness and creativity.
Like Zecchini, I found that by taking the path of insouciance, breakthroughs are possible. Early this year, I finally returned to dynamic apnea – the kind where you’re in motion – and, more relaxed now after all that time spent doing the static variety, made quicker progress in the pool than expected.
One day on holiday in Catalonia I made a few tentative descents in the sea. My great relevation: equalising almost immediately after you duck-dive makes all the subsequent equalisations much, much easier. I managed to get down to around 10 metres without too much hassle, but since I was diving solo (you really shouldn’t do this) I stopped there.
Clinging to the reef in the company of a multicoloured wrasse turning circles in front of me, I reflected that I was too uptight before, too eager. If Lauren Bacall had been a freediver, she might have told me: you just put your lips together and blow.
• This article was amended on 3 August 2023. Raimondo Bucher’s 1949 record was set in the Gulf of Naples not, as a previous version said, in a lake on Capri.
