Who Trolled Amber? - Click Bait | Deep Water Ep5

Episode Date: December 9, 2025

An anti-doping officer tells Lydia that drugs are only considered a problem in freediving on social media, and in podcasts. She learns the problem is bigger, and more complex, and more corrupt, than she realised. Subscribe to Observer+ on Apple Podcasts and Spotify to binge listen to the entire series on Tuesday 18th November.To find out more about The Observer:Subscribe to TheObserver+ on Apple Podcasts for early access and ad-free contentHead to our website observer.co.uk Reporter - Lydia Gard Producer - Gary Marshall. Music supervision and sound design - Karla PatellaSound design - Rowan BishopPodcast artwork - Lola Williams Fact checking - Poppy Bullard, Katie Gunning, Amalie Sortland, Madeleine Parr & Jess Swinburne Executive producer - Basia Cummings Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Observer I remember I was just sitting on my sofa just watching morning TV I was watch a little bit before I start work and go on my Instagram and I saw the clip and to be honest with you it kind of turned my stomach a little bit

On the 19th of September Sam Zennifer was sitting at home getting ready for work She's a Greek pool and depth diver living in the UK. I'm months into my investigation. The Seamass World Championships have just drawn to a close in Greece, and in the aftermath of the competition, many free divers continue to post beautiful underwater shots, reels of their competition dives. They're smiling and crying at the surface

as they receive a white card from the judges to indicate a successful dive. And as Sam scrolling through these reels, An image pops up that stops her dead. I saw Petter coming up from a deep dive. There's a lot of frothing, bloody frothing coming out of his mouth. He is like in a very bad state after the deep dive. He obviously hurt himself diving. It's an extremely hard thing to watch.

The video is a compilation of clips of Petter Clover posted in collaboration with Vitamir Marichich on Instagram and Facebook. Petar surfaces after having what looks like a deep blackout, his eyes rolling back in his head. He's being held by Vitamir who's trying to administer oxygen, but Petar is vomiting, bright red, foaming blood. His body is rigid, his eyes are wide open and vacant. The blood keeps coming.

The underscore music is dramatic, theatrical and filmic. When he eventually comes around, he's moaning and coughing and crying out in pain. He's had a deep blackout and a lung squeeze. I know it happens sometimes, but the glorification of it is what struck me the most. I think they just wanted to attract a lot of attention. You know, and I'm saying they, because I consider a small group of free divers, that they die very dangerously and they promote it. The reason it upsets Sam is that it doesn't seem to be a cautionary tale.

The overlay text that runs alongside the video says accidents happen. And then there's a list of all the serious things that can go wrong at depth. Blackout. CO2 intoxication. Decompression illness. Pulmonary barot trauma. System acidosis. nitrogen narcosis

and it reads if you're lucky all of it at once the message seems to be this is what being a professional athlete looks like and the trick is to recognise it and know what to do

the video ends with education experience practice stay safe sometimes in free diving we want to look at pretty things we want to look at pretty

girls in bikinis diving and, you know, people coming up from the dive and having a kind of, you know, enlightenment. No, that is not the case. There is a struggle and there are mistakes. So if that video had a different narrative, I would have used it to show everybody and say, look, fair play. It happened to them. They've admitted the wrongs.

It happens in diving and we should all avoid it. But that wasn't the case, was it? It was a glorification of pushing to get better. You have to almost kill yourself. Among the 26 hashtags are hashtag pushing limits, hashtag life on the edge, and hashtag shocking truth. And as I'm writing this, it has had more than 7 million views, 36,000 likes and 760 comments. That's viral by free diving standards.

The following day they post again, this time a series of images, a runner vomiting on his hands and knees, an American football player whose shin bone is snapped at a hideous angle, a race car driver with serious burns scarring across his face. The reel spreads like wildfire through the community. Underneath the video, the comments flood in and the debate is electric. It feels like the most consequential moment in the sport since the Vertical Blue scandal two years ago. And it's the same two people at the center of it.

Free Diving's New Heroes. I'm Lydia Gard, and from Tortoise Investigates, and The Observer, This is Deep Water. Episode 5, Clickbait. I was in the studio when the reel popped up on my feed. I watched it three times and then set my phone aside to record. I don't mind the sight of blood, but it was harrowing to watch. And I kept replaying it in my mind.

I was intrigued. I wanted to know what their motivation could be for sharing that. The accident in the video was from two years ago. It wasn't a news story. It wasn't a video. It was a compilation of clips. Someone had spent time editing that. And it featured two people who've been at the center of a doping scandal.

They've spent the last two years collecting free diving medals. across pool and depth competitions, gaining followers and influence as well as momentum. Vitamir has planned and orchestrated a number of Guinness World Record Underwater stunts lately. He announced that he'd been appointed as Croatian National Team Coach. He's Ada Croatia president. He's sponsored by one of the biggest brands in free diving and an ambassador for another. And when they post this, he's about to be a judge at the Ada World Championships in Limassol in October 2025. And this video seems to be a brazen, unashamed portrayal of serious injuries

with him as the coach and the safety diver. It's confusing. In the words of one person who commented, it's like a pyromaniac addicted to watching the destruction of what others have built for years. Who would you want your role model to be in the end of the day? If your children were to be introduced to free diving, The post from PETA would not be someone that would want my children to follow. Safety and doping are separate but not unrelated issues.

They follow the same fault line. The reality is that this group are promoting a different approach. And I want to understand that approach. I'm weeks into setting up an interview with Vitamir. And I want to ask him, among other things, if I'm missing something. Is there a read of this that's intended to share safety knowledge? to help others avoid similar situations. But he's proving hard to pin down.

He's travelling and in demand. So in the meantime, I reach out to some experienced safety divers, and in the course of my reporting, I asked them about the video. One tells me that Vitamir's in-water rescue in the real is good practice, that he's obviously knowledgeable about safety protocols. But when I ask what the motivation could be for sharing it, he shrugs, shakes his head. looks away.

And it leaves me wondering, is it just flexing, romanticising this attitude Travis talked about in episode four of playing up to the line? Or is it just clickbait? Because let's face it, if this was intended to get attention,

it worked. As the reel starts to gain traction, the comments section blows up. Their supporters say things like, stop blaming athletes for their walk on the edge. And everyone is welcome here. Petara is pushing limits. He's willing to share the dark side of free diving.

By all means, go on pretending that it doesn't exist. That's fine. There's a place for you there. There's also a place here for Petal Clover. While their critics say, The Guinness World Records is where your stunts belong. There you can take all the pills in O2 that you want to feed the misinformation machine, but please stop calling it free diving.

There's a group of people that they dive searching for those limits on a constant basis. You know, anybody can grind their teeth and black out. Anyone can grind their teeth and hurt themselves and rely on others to help them, bring them back to consciousness. You know, anyone can do that. Anyone can dive like that with complete disregard of safety. of others than themselves. And as a mother of teenage boys myself, I know firsthand that who our heroes are matters.

It's like Boris told me in episode four, when an athlete learns to attract attention, that translates as positions of power, influence, sponsorship, income. They build a brand and profit from it. Let's face it, with social media, anything bad will attract possibly a lot more followers than anything good. There is that danger. I mean, it's happening already. It's happening on every other aspects of social media. Why shouldn't it happen a free diving? It's not unlike the

viral game, run it straight. A version of rugby, where two players run full speed at one another, sometimes ending with one of them blacking out from concussion. What started as a backyard game in New Zealand has recently found a new life online, and the net result is a teenage boy recently died after playing it. So what's happened is they've tapped into that and they've increased their followers. They've increased the people that are coaching because they're always going to be naivity in the sport,

it's going to be ego in the sport, all of those negative things are still there. But what I am asking is that the people that they are top athletes is to sit back and think a little bit what they're promoting. I mean, I am a pusher. I'm not going to lie about that, you know, and people in my club would say, yeah, okay, who are you to talk? But there is pushing and then there is aggression.

Look, I mean, I'm going to be honest with you, yes? I've had a blackout in the pool world championship myself. And it was an accident, you know. I pushed my limit. And since then, I have learned that that is not a good thing. It's not something that you search for. Vitamir's approach has supporters, like Talia Davidov, one of his most successful students. She posted a video of a blackout in September 2, captioned,

My First Nap-Nap-Nap of the season. It is much easier to watch. In it, she surfaces, blacks out and comes around again laughing. There's no dramatic music, no blood. The caption beneath the video is an explanation of what happened and why. So it's informative, if casual. I started watching the video and I saw the blood and I turned off. I was a bit outraged, you know.

This is Fernando Bezo Silver, or Bezo. He's a free diver. He's a free diver and an emergency doctor specialising in lung injuries. Vitamir says in his post, Our goal has always been the highest possible level of safety, improving and learning. This has driven significant research, including the first six-year longitudinal study on lung squeeze effects soon published. So I ask in the Free Diving Science Facebook group,

who best understands the impact of repeated lung injury? and several people said Bezo I didn't realize before our call but Bezo tells me that he and Vitamere are good friends What do you think the message of the video was What was the point being made I don't know I do not understand it I'm

I'm puzzled It's not something I even relate to In any emotional or intellectual level I don't get As a friend, you haven't contacted him and had a conversation about it? I have not. Maybe I should. Yeah, I don't know.

I think people do weird stuff in their lives and I don't know what motivates them. I'm always... thinking that people do things because they think is right. I always try to see why they think is right. I want to get a different read on it, afford them the benefit of the doubt. Vitamus says that safety is his highest priority. Maybe the blood and the blackouts just look bad.

But once you start to have blood, blood is inflammatory. Blood is going to cause fibotic tissue. It's going to, if you have blood, you're going to have damage. And that is the part that I can't agree. I don't think squeezing should ever be a part of, consider normal progression in free diving. I don't agree with that. An article about free diving barotrauma,

injuries like squeezes, was published in October 23 by the Divers Alert Network and the University of San Diego. In it, Vitamir writes, From our experience, the next day is usually good to go, but for extra safety and comfort, a day or so off is good, especially before a big performance. He goes on to say,

there is not much correlation for a risk of recurrence unless the diver is mentally weak or overly emotional. He says, the more we squeeze, the more we improve, and the deeper we can go without squeezing. If Vito Mir is hearing this, we're a good friend, And he says that publicly and loudly has no,

that's why I feel comfortable actually saying his name. But he says, dude, free diving, squeezing is part of depth progression, is part of training well. I want to talk about Vertical Blue or VB, our elite competition, the one where the bag search happened. How common is it in competition diving for people to squeeze? when you're at that elite level, let's say, like you've done medical stuff for VB, right?

Yes. So let's say, let's take VB as an example because these people are really pushing themselves and this is our elite community. How common is it? I would say in a competition, especially a competition like VB, that there's people really push to the limit

is unfortunately more common than we would think. my first day on VB, I was not there as a staff physician. I was volunteering. I was just collecting research data. But on the first day, there were eight blackouts and I think five squeezes. Three were pretty bad squeezes. That's an important point. This isn't a shiny new problem.

Nor can it be attributed to any particular people. One diver I met in Greece was very well versed on the topic. He mirrored what Boris said, that it all changed when the sport became more professional. When organisers started paying people to be safety divers, the in-water diver responsible for a competing athlete, that the community split into workhorses and racehorses, so to speak. And then the advent of social media became an echo chamber

instead of a place to gather and discuss. After Greece, this safety diver sent me an email which said, This is the culture of Itimir walked into and I think he exploited it. I think 10 years ago, the vast majority of free divers would have told you squeezers are dangerous and you should take them seriously.

Part of the problem, just like with the impact of benzos on deep diving, is that there's a distinct lack of research into the long-term consequences of lung squeeze. So while what Bezo says makes sense, it's untested, unproven, lacking evidence. And that leaves a vacuum in which people can push until they find their own limit. We need more research, but also how even would we do research with the dangers of benzodiazepines at depth are going to throw people to 120 meters on benzos?

Ethically, it's hard, right? How do you get the information? Yeah, that's the thing of research in free diving in addition to lack of money there's a lot of stuff that is not easy to research and we simply have to extrapolate knowledge from similar areas in medicine that already have an answer.

This isn't the first time I've heard this. It's a common complaint. We have a lack of medical evidence, a lack of research in free diving. But someone is trying to change that. I'm from Belgrade Serbia. I'm professor of sports medicine and I'm in anti-doping from 2003. Nanad Dickich is the anti-doping officer who is appointed by Ada in the wake of the vertical blue doping scandal.

And in June this year, Ada announced a study to assess whether benzodiazepines are present in free diving competitions and whether their use may pose risks to safety or fairness. fairness. Apparently, Aida have done more than 120 doping controls. Urine samples have been taken anonymously, with athlete consent, to detect benzos and other similar substances. The aim is not to punish or stigmatize, but to protect the athletes. Nobody is protecting athlete. Who is protecting athletes? Tell me, because you are journalists, you need to take care about them, not to take care about science, benzodiazepines, organization. organization, system, etc., etc. I think the main role is to take care about athletes. Nobody is

taking care about them. Nenad tells me about a paper that he published in July about the vertical blue case. It's a critique of CMAS and their code of ethics, and the cases argued in defense of the athletes. It focuses on the legal controversy of the way the vertical blue bag search happened and was recorded and cites potential violations of the athlete's human rights. In short, Nenad argues that William Trubridge broke the rules, CMAS were not within their rights to punish the athletes, and the victims of Vitamir and Petter. By the time I speak to Nenad, I've already read his paper and listened to a number of his online seminars on the topic of doping and the scandal. And when I first email him to request an interview, his reaction

strikes me as odd. He says, I'm not sure that doping has such an important role in free diving as it appears on the internet, and therefore, I'm not convinced it should take priority when writing about free diving. He wants to focus on other areas, which are legitimate, but he is, after all, the anti-doping officer. It seems odd to say that this isn't the thing to be talking about, and yet beheading a water-backed study. I ask whether it would be better to ban Benzo, from a safety perspective, even if there's no evidence to say they constitute doping. But if you like, is it safe? Of course it's not safe. I mean, because benzodiazepines are they are depressing central nervous system. They are slowing reaction time. They are impairing

judgments. I personally only worry about the use of any medication at all that might have a dangerous side effect at depth because there is a very small margin for error when you dive deep. if you are concerned about that I mean I need really to ask you why I mean is it your profession why you are concerned about that I mean I'm medical as I told you I'm medical professional

I am that is my sport that is something where I'm present every day so do you think that I'm not concerned or do you think that I'm crazy and I would allow somebody to use any drugs who could potentially be dangerous for him and because of that drug could harm his health

or maybe even that No, if benzodiazepines have a potential negative side effect in the brain and in the body and in our response time and everything else at depth, then it strikes me that that is likely to be more dangerous than diving without them. How do you know that? How do you know that? How do you know that? I push back, but the conversation gets harder to navigate, more frustrating. So somehow I don't see that there is an issue of doping in free diving. I see that there is issue of doping in free diving.

but on social networks or in podcasts. He doesn't mention William Trubridge by name, but it's clear he believes the allegations stem from social media and that there's no basis for them. So I tell him about my investigation, what people have told me about the use of benzodiazepines. Some people will have them medically prescribed. Others might watch the success of those people

and want to experiment with the same drugs, even though they don't have the underlying medical condition. What do you think of that? Do you know any case of that? Do you know anything? Do you know even one example? Yeah, I have been told by a couple of divers that they've been offered them,

encouraged to take them in certain communities. Come on, that is a joke. I'm, as I said, one of my topic is ethics and prevalence. And I am listening to that stories for the last, I don't know, 25 years. and I've got information from some guy and that guy told me that there is a friend who is using that. I mean, that is not serious. So there is no how to say possibility to prove that allegation

and something that is coming again from social networks. It makes me think about what Travis said, that the system doesn't want to hear it. And yet, history dictates that whistleblowers are crude, in the fight against doping. It would stand to reason that the anti-doping officer would want athletes to feel safe, coming forward, speaking to him in confidence.

But if enough, I mean, this is how we work as journalists. We have to speak to witnesses and then have the witnesses' stories corroborated by other people. And if enough people are telling me the same story about the same community, then it starts to feel like it has more import. It's not one person saying, that guy said such and such.

We're building a picture. I've been interviewing people for months and months. I disagree. As I told you in first email, I don't believe that doping is a problem in free diving because there is no proof. We do agree on one thing, that evidence is the way forward.

It just feels like we're looking at the problem from opposite sides of a spectrum of truth, symptomatic of split in the community. Will Trubridge suggested that you'd defended the narrative of Vitamere and Petar after Vertical Blue. What do you say to that? Vitomir. Ah, Vitumir and Petter. I'm not defending them.

I mean, I will the same do for you. If you have been there and you are just the athlete who are coming to remote island to go on competition and somebody, how to say, treated you like he treated them. I mean, I will do the same. Nenna tells me the results of the Benzo Research Project will likely come out in early 2026. If there's evidence that they're being widely used or abused, then they'll create a scientific experiment to find out what risk they pose at depth. I ask, ethically, how can you prove whether Benzos are dangerous for depth? But he prevaricates. He says evidence. And I reiterate,

yes, my question is, when they have the evidence, and if that evidence shows that benzos are being used to dive, then how can we test to see if it's dangerous? How do you prove whether it's dangerous or not? You can prove with your samples that you're taking, how many people are? You could not cover with one, research everything. And I don't have even intention to do that. I just imagine that we prove that there is not so many divers who are doing that.

Why, for God's sakes, we will continue to work on that. And I mean, it is somehow, how to say, something which is pushed by social network, by believing. But as I said, we as a scientist, we don't believe in something. We are challenging something, research something. And since you are from England, I'm just asking you a question. I mean, is it fair that one athlete is punished because of something which is not really, how to say, enhancing substance, which is not on the list,

et cetera, et cetera. Who is safeguarding that, how to say athlete? That is the question. I ask if only 1% of that sample are taking benzos, but they still may be the same 1% on the podiums, then what? And he says they'll take that into consideration. Except how can they, if the testing's anonymous? It feels like a smokescreen.

And while the speculation continues, there is one group left to speak to. It feels more pressing than ever to hear from Vitamir, Petter and Sander, because the questions that remain swirling are questions that only they can answer. Coming up in the final episode. There's constantly attempts to paramas and you've seen from my communication with you that I'm maybe even still concerned

that this podcast is just an attempt to do the same. Thank you for listening to Deepwater. It's reported by me, Lydia Gard. The producer is Gary Marshall Music Supervision by Carla Patella Sound design by Rowan Bishop Podcast artwork by Lola Williams Fact-checking by Poppy Bullard

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