Who Trolled Amber? - Don’t hold your breath | Deep Water Ep4

Episode Date: December 2, 2025

The CEO of the United States Anti-Doping Agency – and the man who caught Lance Armstrong – has advice for Lydia. It’s not what she’s expecting.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 All right, well have a lovely evening and thank you again for your time. By now, I've spoken to more than 50 free divers, from judges and medics to coaches and athletes. When this began, I was calling people I know personally, and closing each conversation with the same question. Who should I speak? to next. And as I followed up on those leads across every time zone on the map, one thing has become clear. Everyone has a strong opinion on the subject of doping, and everyone has an opinion on the scandal, on the Croatians. But much of what I'm hearing is still passed on rumour,

gossip, and to a certain degree, it's a misinformation cascade. Until one afternoon, I'm sitting at home wrapping up an interview and a message appears on my phone from a source. Word has spread that I'm investigating the scandal. I've received several unsolicited messages across email, Instagram and WhatsApp. I've probably heard from a dozen people through the grapevine. Some have interesting new thoughts to add. Others just want to vent. And that's indicative of a community at war with itself. So I'm assuming this will be more of the same. But this particular message is different. It's a forwarded voice note.

It's not really doping, but... And I'm not sure, I mean, it would take away the pain, but it could also take away your sharpness. I've listened to enough of his interviews and YouTube videos to recognize instantly who's speaking. It's Vitamir Marichich, and he's talking about benzos. In a voice note, he's sent to a less experienced diver. This feels like a breakthrough, an insight into how he speaks about this sort of thing in private.

The way it starts, it feels like it's going to unravel into something, a confession perhaps. He talks about his experience of taking diazepam, a type of benzodiazepine, in a competition dive. But what's fascinating is, he says that they didn't work for him, and he discourages this person from using them. He says they take away your sharpness, shortcut, the sense of accomplishment you get from mastering deep dives. What's more, he talks about wanting to see Benzos added to the doping list. He says he's realised that there are so many athletes abusing them. This tallies with his public denials of doping

and the way he condemned a former student, David Custitch, who was banned for a year after testing positive for testosterone. He referred to that incident as one of the worst coaching experiences in my career. and yet sometime after sending this voice note he's carrying three brands three different strengths of benzos to vertical blue he's a top athlete

a prolific coach and in his message he ostensibly warns against trying benzos but he also casually says he has tried them a few times himself including in a pool competition and he says if you really want to try it

yeah you can why not it's not against the law as a coach you aren't just responsible for developing an athlete's technical skills you're developing them as people their values attitudes and behaviours and while that message is mixed it's also explicit permission for new divers to experiment and proof to me that the ink in the water is spreading i'm lydia guard and from tortoise investigates and the observer this is deep water episode four don't hold your breath. This is Boris Spayech. When I started this investigation, I didn't know his name. But several people along the way have suggested that I speak to him. Apparently he knows a lot.

He's connected. What or to whom, I don't know. I have no idea yet which category he falls into. Does he have something interesting to say Or does he just want to vent But he does want to meet in person So we'll just start off with an introduction But of course I don't know what you're telling me

So we'll get through these questions As quickly as we can Nice and concise I've mentally prepared for Boris to tell me something explosive Maybe offer an eyewitness account Or slip me an envelope with sensitive documents So we meet in a hotel in Kalamatta in Greece And find an empty conference room

At the back of the building away from prying eyes and when we start the interview the sun is pouring through the windows by the time we leave it will be dark Boris is a Croatian free diver previously the national team coach now he lives in Kuwait and coaches from there

he says he can give us insights on doping because of his proximity to top tier athletes and the mechanics of the sport as both an athlete and a coach I tell him about how I started this investigation because I'm tired of all the gossip, the conjecture around what's doping, what's performance enhancing, and whether it matters, how the scandal itself has just corrupted the community I love. When were you first made aware of any kind of doping allegations in the sport? Early, early, early.

I start the interview with the basics, but Boris is impatient. You are now being very romantic about things, and I don't like it. Okay, let me remove the pink sunglasses you have. You have to do with professionals, right? And you come from a perspective of a romantic person. This is what I want to focus on. Okay, let's clear this area. PED area is always going to be there.

Take any serious sport. Any, any serious sport, it's always a... He thinks the community's focus on doping, PEDs, performance-enhancing drugs, is too narrow, that we're all zoomed in on the wrong thing, missing the bigger picture. The only thing is the guys that are coming around, right now, they know more about the sports.

Literally, they know more about the sports. Do you mean Vigma and Petter? They're irrelevant. They are pushing themselves. It's not what I'm expecting him to say. For Boris, rooting out individuals is not the answer, or what he's interested in. Instead, he starts to lay out a tangled web of information.

He's clearly extremely bright and very invested. There are many layers to his story, and I'm trying to untangle it in real. real time while understanding the relevance. Some of it's useful, some is not. But it's very clear on one thing. This is about something more significant and I need to zoom out.

Most people are not aware how deep this water goes and what's the future will bring. I think it's not about PEDs anymore. I think it's about the value of a standard of the society, basically. Our society is corrupt. negate the existence of bad examples everywhere around us. Wherever there's business, there's going to be corrupt people. Okay, so if you had to put your finger on what's really shifted in the community...

Money, definitely. There's not, like, people are becoming professionals and they're earning a lot more money. It's funny. The idea that money is the corrupting influence, rather than doping, is new to me. Remember back in episode one, Martin Patruce brushed off the idea that money was a motivation for free divers. True enough, for most free diving instructors, coaches or athletes, it's a sideshow. To make a full living out of it, you have to hustle hard.

In terms of professional sports, free diving is like the pretty young cousin in the family, little or no money, posting sexy content on Instagram and making up the rules as they go along. But if you're clever, there are several potential revenue streams. From sponsorship deals to remuneration for medals, running retreats, training camps, selling coaching programs and hosting competitions. Okay, we're not in the same league as sports like football or cycling or golf, but it's enough to be significant, especially if you hail from a country where their average wage is low. You could arguably make a very good living from it.

It became a business. Okay. And from that point on, things kind of went south. Not all, there are still really good examples in Croatia that people don't know about, but you know when you bring the big money into the big money we are talking about free diving big money when you bring like money into free diving it's like anywhere else in the in the world a lot of money people will do anything to get it and at that point morals become really questionable what to do and how to do it right yeah so I have heard that

there's money involved in winning medals sorry in Croatia which doesn't exist in a lot of other nationalities, but also for the team. The incentive to win is a very individual thing. For starters, there's ego, pure and simple. The desire for public recognition, followers and likes, social status. Then there are the awards, medals, tangible symbols of achievement, a sense of personal satisfaction, of a challenge overcome. I'm no psychologist, but I doubt that these motivations are mutually exclusive.

they overlap but the sport is slowly becoming professionalised in its attitude towards money and sponsorship and in order to capitalise on that you need podium positions you tell me now what would you do in this situation you have kids

what would I do yeah let's say your kid wants to pursue a career of free diver well I've always allowed them to do it recreationally but I've taught them the safety protocols But if they ever wanted to get into competitive free diving, I would hope that by the time they're old enough to get involved like that,

they would have enough of a moral compass from my upbringing and our values. Because you come to anything, whether it's your sport, your job, your life, your relationships, you bring your own moral compass. Perfect. And now a counter argument. Put yourself in a more poor environment. Put yourself in an environment where it's easy to lose. bread on the table and what do you think your son or daughter would do when he is 20 something

and he needs he is just he's missing just this a little bit to put the food on the table or even worse put them like they're serious athletes they've been competing for years they have a brand to you know to show to the others and they are missing just a little bit to guarantee themselves the next period of grace you see what are problems Our problem is not PEDs. Our problem is human nature. And human nature will never change. His point?

The very idea of a sport staying clean from doping or from corruption is naive, unrealistic. Boris, the philosopher. So maybe what we can do is diversify two things. Professionals from people who like free diving. Boris, the politician. And this is probably the best advice I can give to anyone.

If you want to be professional, be ready to eat shit, be ready to embrace the sack, be ready to break your own bones and your own opinions and your own everything, be ready to go to the darkest place you can imagine to be the first.

And once you're first, ask yourself, was it worth it? Using performance-enhancing drugs, if it's happening, as some people suspect, is just a shortcut, albeit an ethically

and morally problematic shortcut to winning. And while this particular shortcut is the antithesis of what sport stands for, fair play, pure human ability, it's a means to an end, and not the end itself. And what Boris says leads me into the centre of a moral maze. You know what I have issues with? I have issues with my 16-year-olds boys coming to me and they're looking at the fucking best free divers in the world

talking about their superhumans. And I know who they are. I know what they are. And I know it's all shit. I don't know what to tell you about the romantic part of the free diving anymore because I'm part of the other side, so-called professionals, which is sad, to be honest. But in general, I think for the sport, what's going to happen is we're going to overcome it.

I'm not sure what's going to be left after all these PED, these candles and everything. I do hope our heroes will be different. This is what I do hope. On the flight home from Greece, I listened back to some of my previous calls, messages and voice notes. I'm trying to collect my thoughts. I send a quick message to a source close to Vitamir.

I ask if it's possible that aside from his own admission of having tried Benzos a few times, the Vitamir is actually clean. They answer immediately. They say he brags about taking diazepam for breakfast and encourage other people he trained to do so. They say he loves pills and takes anything if he finds it useful.

I ask if that's substantiated, if they've seen it with their own eyes and the reply is yes. They also say that they once saw Petar take six diazepam before a competition dive and have an underwater blackout in the pool and afterwards they had a good laugh about it. allegations which Vitamir denies and so far Petar hasn't responded to I reread Vitamir's statement after the scandal

the one where he says I've always adhered to principles of fair play and clean sport valuing the integrity of competition above all I reread the article where Vitamir is quoted as saying not only have we never used them we strongly advocated against it

with the athletes that have confessed to us to using them and I realise Boris is right. Our sport is at a critical juncture. The problem is layered. This is about more than doping. It's about the lengths that people are willing to go to to win.

The risks they're willing to take for themselves, their students, and ultimately their sport in the pursuit of glory, money and medals. Both my coach, Mella and Gary McGraw have told me that free diving needs outside help. And personally, I need some perspective. What would you say that you are most well known for? Being the mean dad at home or something is probably the... Travis Teigart is being modest. He's the CEO of the United States Anti-Doping Agency.

They advocate for clean athletes and clean sport, and he is, in fact, best known for being the man who caught Lance Armstrong. And brilliant soundbites like Winners Never Cheat and Cheaters Never Win. All seven of your Tour de France victories, did you ever take banned substances or blood dope? Yes. When I first contacted Travis, I wanted to ask him one simple question. How do you catch a doper? But the more I've investigated, the more my focus has changed.

Let me clarify, I'm not making a comparison between Lance Armstrong and the Croatian free divers. or his role as an international doping investigator and mine as a journalist. But our conversation illustrated to me that in sport, dooping allegations do more than rat out the cheats. They undermine the entire community. If our top divers, our social media influencers, leading coaches are potentially cheating, is it simply unrealistic to hope that the sport will stay clean?

It took Travis's team and a two-year-old. criminal and federal investigation, a long list of whistleblowers and a burden of evidence to get to that confession. And let's face it, that will not happen in free diving. There's neither the money nor the power. But what if Boris is right, that what matters isn't the individual, but the culture within the sport? The truth eventually is going to come out. And so I think it's probably the number one lesson is the power of the culture, but how culture is dictated by individuals and how every individual, if they can muster the bravery and the courage, can change the culture for the good.

I tell him about the fault lines in free diving and what my investigation has uncovered so far. The difficulties that stem from Benzos being considered by many as performance enhancing, but not on the water list, which means they're not classed as doping. So it comes down to the personal, moral and ethical codes that we live and dive with. I was a philosophy major in undergrad, so we could philosophize about it. So was I. Well, there we go. So we could have a full-on debate, you know, philosophical discussion around the ethics of doing something that society doesn't accept or might arguably be dangerous.

I go back to sport is nothing more than agreement to rules. He told me a story about altitude tents. These tents are designed to mimic the conditions of high altitude by controlling the oxygen levels inside. athletes can use them to train or sleep in. There was a debate. Should they be prohibited? Yes, they give a performance enhancement, increase your red blood cells, your oxygen carrying capacity.

Not everyone has access to them. If you stay in them too long or have them turned up too high, you can get health effects. So they arguably meet the criteria, if not flat out meet the criteria, to be prohibited on the WADA code. But they are not. So am I going to say someone is a cheater or a problem or is not ethical if they use altitude tense?

Absolutely not because I know how competition is and competition is a function. It's a construction of rules. So if it's not in the rule, it's not illegal, then all right, I'm not willing to say that's unethical or shouldn't be done. That's athletes doing what athletes do, which is to try to gain a performance. any way they think they can. The way Travis sees it, allegations about benzos are simply not an anti-doping issue.

A month ago, I would have found that concept unfathomable, but I'm beginning to get it. Right now, all the focus is on this particular group of athletes. Are they or aren't they? Can it be proven that in a way that is secondary? Because in a few years, they will

be gone, and the memory of their names will fade, but the culture will remain. If, you know, people can make rife allegations have proof, maybe, but the sport sticks its head in the ground and pretends like nothing's going on. Whether it's judging problems that are corrupt, whether it's doping allegations, that then necessarily detracts from what we're trying to produce. So it's always been, I believe, in the sport's best interest to get in front of this and cure this problem before it becomes a problem. Some sports are reluctant

to do it, and it is too late. Like in cycling, it became too late. That's certainly been a criticism of Ada, one of the two governing bodies along with Seamus, that Aida had looked the other way, taken too long to act. Permissive or reluctant? That's a question for the Aida president, Sasha Yerimic, who I've arranged to speak to.

But on balance, Travis argues, it sends a message. Some sports, he says, have to hit rock bottom before they address it. And he asks an important question, who are the leaders in a sport like free diving? Because fighting the corruption of a small grassroots sport is about the rules and who sets them. There's a lot of power and money in sport,

and people, whether they're in sport or profiting off of people in sport, don't want necessarily the truth coming out if that means it's going to destroy the problem, profit-making stream or the story or the inspiration in their eyes. And that's why it's so important to have independent organizations. You know, I've termed it the fox guarding the henhouse. It would be impossible to have, you know, the fox scarring the henhouse effectively

because you would never want to, you know, have to wipe away seven tours to France, right? Like, that was a terrible day for everyone who loves sport. I wonder, particularly in free diving, where there's so much overlap between the competition athletes and the volunteers in governance, is there a safe place to blow the whistle? Is it even realistic to expect the sport to create, enforce and safeguard their own rules? And the answer once again is not yet. So in which case, what do you think puts athletes off from speaking up? Yeah, the system doesn't want it, right? Like it's, we know that.

You know, whistleblowers are shun many times. It's unfortunate. The system doesn't want it. This is critical. In my experience of investigating this story is the people with the most information, those who have been closest to those at the center of the scandal who don't want to speak up.

And there are many more who won't speak to me at all because they say they have too much to lose, personally and professionally. And this Omerta simply enables more of the same. But look, I appreciate it's a hard, it's a hard thing to convince people of. The easier path, for sure, is to just walk away. And look, athletes don't want to put themselves. Athletes are in sport to compete, right?

They're not there to worry about the sport politics or the governors of the sport doing the right thing. But stay in it. The worst thing you can do is quit. And there are plenty of top athletes who are very comfortable complaining to one another about the chasm in the community. But they don't want to speak out

because they're trying to maintain their peace and power. Focus on performance, not negativity. They hope it will resolve itself. But more alarmingly, there are a few athletes who've recently told me that if this situation doesn't change, they plan to quit altogether. Meanwhile, faith in the sport from the athletes and the spectators continues to erode.

Let's not be naive that athletes will walk right up to the line. You've heard the term play up to the referee. I mean, my kids were taught that by their coaches in 10-year-old soccer. Play up to the ref, you know, play up to the ref. And again, I'm not saying that's right. I wish the culture wasn't that way. But hyper-competitive cultures, even at 10-year-old soccer, are, do what you do up to the the line in order to win.

It's human nature, right? It's human nature. This is what we're up against. The idea that it's the journey in the process. And of course, to my kids and our education programs, those are really important components. But at the end of the day, people are all competitors

that want to win in those moments. And they'll do anything sometimes if they think they can get away with it to win. Winning for ego, glory, money, or power, it doesn't really matter what the motivation is. If the mindset is to win at all costs, then we've come full circle to what Gary McGraw said in

episode one. That worst case scenario, the someone is going to die. Because the culture, the rules, the mechanisms aren't in place yet for anything to substantially change. And the advice from those who are far more hardened to this than me is don't hold your breath. Coming up in episode five of Deepwater. I saw the clip and to be honest with you, it kind of turned my stomach a little bit. I saw the blood and I turned off. I was a bit outraged. 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. Deepwater is reported by me, Lydia Guard. The producer is Gary Marshall. Music supervision by Carla Patella. Sound design by

Rowan Bishop. Podcast artwork by Lola Williams. Fact checking by Katie Gunning. Script editing by Kerry Thomas. The executive producer is Bashar Cummings. Hello, it's Gary here. I'm the producer of deep water. Before I tell you a bit more about how you can listen to the rest of the series, we have a house notice. You might have seen some changes to our feeds, and that's because we're now bringing our Tortoise Investigate series to you from our new home, The Observer. It's the world's oldest Sunday newspaper, where you can listen to and read incredible journalism every day, seven days a week. So if you're enjoying this podcast, you can listen to all six

episodes today by subscribing to the Observer and listening on the brand new Observer app. By becoming an Observer subscriber, you can also get early access to all our investigations, our premium food and puzzle newsletters and much, much more. If you'd like to find out more, you can visit Observer.com.uk forward slash subscribe. Thank you for listening. Thank you.