Who Trolled Amber? - Depth Wish | Deep Water Ep1

Episode Date: November 18, 2025

Three years ago, travel writer Lydia Gard discovered freediving. An extreme and beautiful sport defined by one objective: to dive as deep as you can on one single breath. It soon became a calling. Then, she stumbled on a darker side of the sport. Rumours that a group of top divers were doping to go deeper.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've been staring at pictures of that blue hole for my entire free diving life and dreaming about standing on that beach. It's almost like you're on stage. It's like you're in the bottom of an amphitheatre. So it's a bit imposing in that way. But once you get in the water, the conditions are so perfect. It is the best conditions in the world for free diving.

This is a close friend of mine, Gary McGraw. I know him because we're both. free divers, drawn to the depth by some strange tug on the soul. The amphitheater he's talking about is Dean's blue hole in the Bahamas. It's the home of Vertical Blue, the most prestigious competition in the free dive calendar. Our Grand Prix equivalent or Wimbledon, if you like. Just underwater. Holding your breath.

Only the best athletes in the world get to dive there. the ones who are pushing the limit of what the human body's capable of. And these are our elite divers, world record holders, champions. Okay, so she just has to show the tag. There it is. And she has a white dog. Every July, they converge on this tiny Caribbean island with a simple goal to see how deep they can dive on a single breath. Wow, wow, phenomenal. If you've heard of free diving before, the chances are you've watched the deepest breath on next.

You've probably seen YouTube videos of people coming up from competition dives and blacking out. It's an extreme sport. But I remember the first time I watched a competition dive. And what I realized is that it's not an adrenaline sport. For a dive to succeed, the diver has to be completely calm and relaxed. The first couple of minutes you do nothing but lie on the surface, breathing slowly and deeply. It's about achieving a stillness that we then carry with us under the water.

Any thoughts, any noise, real or in your mind, are left on the surface. Then you submerge. And there's silence. I take one big full breath. When I submerge myself, I'm looking at the surface of the water from below, which is the most beautiful view. When you're under, there can only be one singular focus.

I close my eyes, And then I just reflect on everything that's happening in my body. I focus on the feelings of my skin, on my fingers, on the rope. There's just that feeling of being present in the moment that I cannot experience anywhere else. In those first 10 meters, your body is buoyant, and you have to make your way down, either by kicking with long fins, by swimming,

or by using the rope to pull yourself into the depths. With your eyes gently closed, you assess the depth by the quality of the light. The darker it gets, the deeper you are. As you go down, your lungs compress because of the pressure, and then you lose some buoyancy, and then comes a point where you're neither thinking or floating, you're just weightless, and this moment of the dive, and even staying there is something where I feel fully. at peace.

One last kick or pull here will be enough to propel you down. This is when the most peaceful part of the dive begins, the free fall. And at that point, you're just really sinking and relaxing and enjoying the speed. And it's such a nice feeling when it's effortless and everything's working. By 30 metres, your lungs are reduced to the size of a fist. You're more dense than the water. You sink at roughly one metre. per second.

And you know this feeling of the water surrounding you, maybe it comes from our development, but it's really something I enjoy it. And then you hit the bottom of the line without even realizing it. You know, there was no anxiety in your thoughts about how deep you're going. Also for people that go really deep comes something called the narcosis. You really experience some kind of high. It's a bit addictive. And now the hard work begins.

It's time to ascend. Let's say this is a hundred-meter dive. There's now 100 metres of water above you. By now you've been submerged for around 1 minute, 40 seconds. That's 100 metres of work to get back to the surface. Back to your breath. Deep divers often describe 100 metres as a spiritual depth. To get down there is impressive.

To get back up again, the strength, focus and trust required is formidable. And on occasions that everything falls into place, we call that a beautiful dive. Those kind of dives are, I think, what we all search for. Those are the ones that I have to have again and again and again. That's three minutes of work. on that actual dive but you don't think about the year of work that's gone in beforehand

and it's that year of work that I love it's that journey that I love and to skip parts of that journey or to shortcut it they just wouldn't feel honest to me. That journey to achieve peace at depth is what captivates free divers

and keeps us coming back for more and though it's a small sport it's growing rapidly attracting a wider audience capturing the attention of the Olympic committee. But for a while now, rumours have been circulating that there are drugs that can shortcut that process, overcome the anxiety, override the body's warning signs to get you deeper. When I first heard the rumours, I was stunned. The idea of being 100 metres deep is

already so intimidating. Why would you add more risk? So I asked around, and I began to realise just how deep the water is. I'm Lydia Garde, and from Tortus Investigates and the Observer, this is deep water. Episode 1, Depth Wish. In the beginning, I had to get over the nerves of being in a place like that. You're in the free diving church. It's like a cathedral.

It's such a well-known spot for us free divers. And to actually be there, be lucky enough to go there and compete there, that was something I had to get used to. But once I did, it's just heaven. In 2022, Gary McGrath dived to 112 metres at Vertical Blue. That's the same distance as 34 floors of a skyscraper. The dive took three minutes and 13 seconds. And when he returned to the surface, he had the British national record.

Year after year, free divers like Gary test the limits of human endurance to reach greater depth and the same was expected the following year in 2023. World record attempts were planned and the chosen few elite divers began to gather on Long Island in the Bahamas. Except that year's competition will be remembered for very different reasons. My name is Marine Simunis. I'm from Belgium, a free dive.

from Belgium, and I hold the national records from there. That July, Marine Simonis steps off the plane at Dead Man's Key. Today is going to be my sixth year of competing. I went straight into competition because I was like, okay, let's try to go deep, and that was it. You have to understand, free diving is a relatively small sport, and the people who compete are just a fraction of the community as a whole. Maybe a couple of hundred people around the world compete in depth. And of them, there might be 50 or 60 divers whose lives revolve around the competition calendar.

They travel between Kalamatta in Greece and Dominica in the Caribbean, cash in Turkey, to Dahab, Egypt. But you don't just turn up and dive. You'd need to spend a few weeks at a competition site if you're really trying for a record. That way, you can get your bearings and settle in. Your body can get used to the water temperature and something called the thermocline, which is an invisible layer in the ocean where the temperature drops, sometimes dramatically. And the divers trained together, coach one another. They share Airbnbs for weeks, sometimes months while they prepare for competition.

They eat together, they sometimes even sleep together. But most importantly, they depend on each other for in-water safety. The first rule of free diving, never dive alone. Free divers literally depend on each other for something. What I'm getting at here is that this is a close circle. We know each other. If globally free divers are a community and competition divers are a tribe, will vertical blue competitors are something closer to a family?

When Marine lands, the first thing she does is message a friend. Asking her, hey, are you there yet? And she was like, yeah, have you heard about the big thing? And then she told me, and obviously, in the... the first place, you're like, whoa. While Marine was flying across the Atlantic, preparing for the days ahead, a drama was unfolding on Long Island,

a rip tide in what should be serene water. Among the athletes who have already touched down in the Bahamas, there are big names in the free diving world. Some of them controversial, like the Croatian team. They have big plans for this competition. One of them, Petal Clover, is aiming to challenge a world record which has stood since 2016. And when they arrive at Deadman's Key Airport on the 4th of July, 2023,

after a long flight, they're met by the competition organiser. It's not a welcome committee. He's accompanied by the police and he asked to inspect their luggage. She told me that there had been a big search on arrival the day before and that things were found in the luggage of the Croatian team. Between them, the divers have three bags. and what's found in them causes a storm surge. 33 different substances are found in the bags,

one of which is banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency and other medications widely believed to be performance-enhancing, not to mention potentially dangerous. The entire search is recorded. The news spreads through the community and WhatsApp chats are blowing up. Instagram is flooded with questions. The Croatian athletes at the centre of this are Vitamir Marichich, Petar Klova and Sanda Delaya

and they're accused of doping. The community in the first place is like a family because we're all experiencing kind of the same stuff being away from home for a long time and pushing our own limits, the limits of our bodies, the limits of our bodies and it has some difficulties. So we're a very strong family and then this thing happens and the thing that happens is really a polarisation of the community.

For several months in the run-up to the competition, rumours had been circulating about these athletes, about a corrupting influence that has entered the sport. And now, while there's recorded evidence, divers have arrived at a world record status competition, with suitcases full of pharmaceuticals. The real turning point, I think for most people, was vertical blue. I heard about it when the vertical blue scandal appeared.

Certain people who are with Vitamira and Petar, and that's caused a lot of friction. It's just a polarising issue. I don't think it'll ever go away. The search becomes known as the doping scandal, and it splits the community. On social media, there were those who signed and shared a petition calling to ban. them. Vitriolic Instagram and Facebook posts circulated, calling the team cheats and liars, while others in their support focused on how the bag search was orchestrated, how the Croatian team had been singled out, how it looked like a setup. Why were they the only team that were searched? I had a strong opinion in the first place. Then you realize that nothing is

either black or white, just like in life. The divers whose bags were found full of drugs, publicly stated that the accusations of doping were false, unfair and unfounded. But something had changed in free diving. Fast forward to today, they're still competing and winning world records. They're standing on the podium next to, or in place of, divers who signed petitions to have them banned. And as new depths are reached, competitors now look at one another with a level of suspicion. And it's prompted me to ask,

If there is ink in the water, how do you stop it from spreading? set out to bring these two parts of my life together. If anything, I've worked hard to keep them separate. Journalism is work, free diving is my sanctuary, although I suppose I have one to thank for the other. As a travel writer, I was commissioned to review a retreat in 2022. So in 2022, I was running a breathwork and movement retreat along with a friend that was in Andalusia in a place called Suria Lila. It's like a yoga retreat center. When I was invited, I wasn't convinced. The breathwork elemented the retreat did not appeal to me. The idea of lying still fills me with dread. But it was a chance to reset. So I booked my flight to

Spain, but I packed my running shoes just in case I needed to escape. Free diving wasn't actually in the program of the whole retreat, but because of the fact that I just started free diving and And, of course, every free diver needs to tell everybody else that they're a free diver and free diving is the best thing in the world. So I decided to tell all the participants about this beautiful practice. Martin Petrus, who was running the retreat, was not at all what I'd expected from a breathwork coach. I had imagined this Instagram shaman or hush tones and prayer beads and then in walked this normal guy in jeans and a t-shirt, a recovering graphic designer.

with an undercut and an orca tattoo on his forearm. I had no idea that meeting him would lead me here now. On the last day of the retreat, we ran to Lake Arcos for a swim. It looked like a puddle, and I decided that it would be a great idea to do a static breath hold in that lake. A static breath hold is exactly what it sounds like. The diver remains still on the surface, only their face, their airways submerged, And you stay like that for as long as you can on a single breath.

So that could be one of the worst places that you could try free diving, but still you loved it. I know, it sounds like a strange thing to fall in love with. There's not much to it really, just holding your breath, face down in a murky lake. Just you and the air in your lungs. That first minute or so is, frankly, outrageous. It's a strange struggle.

just trying to remain calm when your body is literally crying out for you to breathe. But the urge to breathe isn't the same as being low on oxygen. It's just increased CO2. It's a physiological response. With practice, you learn to notice it and let it go. And then this stillness comes. As your heart rate starts to slow, you begin to turn your attention inwards to the sensations in your body and everything becomes calm.

You feel peaceful. I didn't realize it then, but this was my first real experience of mindfulness, and when I came up for air, I had this huge rush of endorphins. I felt ecstatic. I wanted to go again. My first breath hold lasted for two minutes.

Martin seemed pretty pleased. I tried again, and I reached two and a half, then three minutes, 20 seconds, and we both got quite excited. then. I remember you saying that you were doing something similar on your own, like just diving and pulling yourself down on an anchor chain. I know that you are very good in water. Water is my element. I grew up on boats and beaches. My sister and I would compete over who could hold their breath for the longest as we were ragdolled in the surf. I collected shells and empty bottles from the seabed.

I never really thought about it. A lot of British free divers come to this sideways from spearfishing. They get frustrated when they can't get deep enough for a catch and turn to free diving for answers. Around the world, there are loads of tribes and communities that depend on free diving for their livelihoods. Like the Malaysian Baozhou fishermen or the Japanese Amur women. There's a sponge harvesting tradition in Greece called Scandalopetra, where they dive headfirst holding a big stone to pull them to the bottom. bottom the point is none of us knew we were free diving until we were told back on the surface

the quality of my breath has changed I feel less anxious less preoccupied by worries I'm more connected to myself stronger That's the pool for me. I learned to surrender to the water and it reconnected me to myself. That salt hug that I mentioned, that's what unites us. Well, that's what I thought. But maybe I've been romanticizing it. With time, I realized that there is this strong competitive component to it and a lot

of people are really pushing. very peculiar because, well, the money is very low, so that is not the incentive. For all the spirituality, free diving is a sport, a sport measured in numbers, and where there's competition, there's ego. I wanted free diving to be this simple world I could escape into, but every conversation leads back to the doping scandal and what came afterwards. Everyone wants to know what's going to happen, and there are no clear answers. And I'm a journal. I just want to know the truth. So we are in Mitikas.

We landed last night quite late in Athens and drove halfway here, woke up this morning and finished the journey, and we're waiting for David Mellar. I can see the dive boat now coming in. They've just arrived back from a morning's training. It's August 2025, and I'm in Mitikas, Greece. A tiny village set right on the water, only accessible my miles of winding mountainous road. And Dave Meller is here, training for the World Championships.

How are you doing? How are you doing? This is the guy Martin put me in touch with, and he became my coach. As a multiple world record holder, he is my gateway into the world of competition. free diving. Why are you speaking up about the doping issue? I don't like what it's doing to the sport.

I don't like what's going on because, like, two years we're talking later. Is the sport in a better position now than it was two years ago? No, 100% not. Are more people using drugs of some sort? Probably yes. The doping

scandal at Vertical Blue offered an opportunity to address a divisive issue that was corrupting the sport. And in the eyes of many in the community, that opportunity was wasted. And that has consequences. I didn't realize at the time, I thought it was just some people are cheating to get results. But I didn't realize what impacts that can have on the whole community, the whole sport. So that's what this story is about.

About a community that's a microcosm of society and how the fabric of that society has started to fray. In free diving, that corrupting influence takes the form of a group of people, determined to push their bodies and the sport to the limit of what's possible. But it's not straightforward because the medications that may help enhance performance in free diving aren't helpful in most sports. Many of them aren't on the wild anti-doping agencies' list of prohibited substances. They may be performance-enhancing, but they aren't technically doping. And if people are taking them to dive deep, well, best case scenario, those divers would dominate the podium.

clean athletes will give up and the sport's dead in the water. Worst case scenario, people will die. It's kind of like the cartel. You want the Pablo Escobar caught, don't you? You know, maybe the thing crumbles a little bit. Or something done. There's no deterrent at the moment because nobody's getting caught, nobody's even seen to be getting caught.

And if someone does get caught, it's hushed up. Coming up in episode two of Deepwater. There were some performances that were making people think, wow, this person either is one in 10 million or something else is happening. Part of what's wrong with competitive free diving, how it's so open to abuse. I got told that there was like a group that was forming and they were getting together to try to find a way to do something about it. Who was in that group? Deepwater is reported by me, Lydia Gard. The producer is Gary Marshall

Music supervision and sound design by Carla Patella Podcast artwork by Lola Williams Fact-checking by Poppy Bullard The executive producer is Bashar Cummings Hello it's Gary here I'm the producer of Deepwater Before I tell you a bit more about how you can listen to the rest of the series

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