Who Trolled Amber? - Fair Play | Deep Water Ep2

Episode Date: November 18, 2025

Lydia travels to Kalamata, Greece, a renowned freediving spot to investigate the doping allegations. What substances are athletes meant to be taking? And what are the risks – to them, and to the sport she loves?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 Where's home to you? Home, home is a sea now, yeah. David Meller started competition free diving seven years ago. When he became my coach, he recently adopted a nomadic lifestyle, teaching and training at dive spots around the world. world. Wherever you go, you usually make new friends.

So in the end, pretty much you could dive anywhere in the world and you know you're going to meet somebody. Back in August, he was in Mitokas, Greece, training for a competition. And that's where we arranged to meet. In a quintessential Greek tavernor, only a few steps from the water's edge. What makes it addictive? What keeps you coming back for more? Yeah, I mean, addictive.

We all say don't chase the numbers, right? We all chase numbers, but it's the way you chase the number. What will be enough for you, do you think? I don't know. I always thought 50 metres was enough. I remember saying that to myself, that 50 metres is deep enough. And the minute I did 50 metres, it had to be 55. And the minute I did 100, it has to be 105.

And I'm sure, you know, 105. it'll be more. Mella's now a multiple world record holder. There's not a lot that goes on without him knowing. So it's no surprise that the first time I heard talk about potential doping, I was with him. The first time I'd travelled to see Mellar was back in October, 2022. We'd arranged to meet in cash, Turkey.

The vertical blue doping scandal was still nine months away. I landed the day after a world championship competition had wrapped. The town was still milling with free divers. At the harbour, we settled on a rooftop restaurant, overlooking the main square. I remember the branches of huge olive trees were strung with fairy lights. I remember watching the dive.

I was sat on the boat watching. Mella told me that a new world record had just been set by a relatively new diver. In 95 metre, no fins dive. That means no fins, no rope, nothing but a modified breaststroke to get you all the way down and up again. That's a serious depth.

But something about it seemed different. And what struck me, and like I said, I've seen world records before and everyone cheering and everybody like clapping. And I remember being on the boat around lots of different nations watching this dive and the world record being broken and very few people clapping.

And I thought it was strange because the world record had been broken, you know. And at the time, did you understand why they weren't enthusiastically? No, not really, no, no. In the moment, it's unclear why there wasn't a celebration on the athlete's boat. But in the days after, Melle hears a rumour that that diver is doping. And who was that dive? The diver was petar.

So up until that point, you'd heard rumours. We had rumours, yeah, like Specifically about anybody or? Well, yeah, I mean, two of the Croatians. I mean, I don't think that's a secret. Petar and Vitamir are very controversial, I think, in free diving. I think they're the main reason for the split in the community. You love them or you don't.

Petar Clover and his coach, Vitamir Marichich, are a new wave of free divers. They're the two Croatian athletes who later appear at the centre of the vertical blue doping scandal. When I heard the rumors, I looked these guys up on Instagram. I could see straight away that they practice free diving in a very different way. They're the poster boys for masculinity. Their feeds are full of max deadlifts, underwater stunts, highlining videos and muscular torso shots.

There's a performative aspect to it, from the simulated underwater fights to clips of jumping into the pool on a noose and sinking hangman style. or performing pretend waterboarding while submerged in a hood. And they have a big following. You only have to read the comments to see that a lot of young aspiring divers are watching. It was unsettling.

I had a sense that something was about to change. I'm Lydia Gard, and from Tortoise Investigates and the Observer, This is Deepwater. Episode 2, Fair Play. Petar came from nowhere and was doing some very big, big dives, yeah. Which were making people take notice, but some of these dives were a bit too good. There were some performances that were making people think, wow,

this person either is one in ten million or something else is happening, you know. In 2018, Vitamir Marichich was already a seasoned athlete. He was 33, muscular and powerful. He'd been a sports climber. Then his girlfriend at the time introduced him to free diving, and he was training at his local swimming pool in Rieca, a city on the Croatian coast. It was at that pool that Vitamir met Petar Klova, who worked there as a lifeguard. Petar was a swimmer, already conditioned.

Together they began to train, with Vitamir as coach and Petter as diver. Petter did his first depth competition in 2019, a no-fins dive to 60 metres deep. No-Fins is considered the hardest and most challenging discipline. It's for purists. No rope, no fins, no help to get you back to the surface. You need strength, technique and courage. Two months later, he entered his first world championships

and performed a 70-meter dive. Back then, Vitamir's Instagram feed had 20,000 followers and was largely populated by self-portraits, travel pictures and adventure pursuits like highlining in the mountains, making bubble rings in the ocean and surfing. He comes across then as friendly, brave and humble. And in January 2019, he posts on Instagram announcing that he's joined a program for random out-of-competition doping control by Wadder. In the caption, he says,

I know that there has been debate and speculation about me using banned science. substances. Even though in my entire athletic and coaching career, I'm strongly against it. But Mella wasn't the only diver to observe strange things when the Croatians got in the water. Gary McGrath had seen things too. Some of the training divers I did were in Turkey we go on a very big boat. There'll be 25, 33 divers on there with a couple of dive lines hanging off the back. It's 22 and Gary is training for the World Championships in cash. He's telling me about one of the training dives

in the run-up to that competition and something that Vitamir and Petar did on that dive which really struck him. After some of these dives, there was some bottles of whiskey brought out, some really high-end whiskey, and I thought, okay, maybe it's someone's birthday, I don't know, 11 in the morning, neat whiskey.

I like a whiskey every now and again, but two or three, neat whiskies after being, you know, the dehydration you feel after a dive. Gary is talking about immersion diuresis. It's a physiological dive response. In short, when we're deep underwater, our circulating blood volume increases. The body reads that as fluid overload, and we urinate. A lot.

And the idea of drinking anything, except maybe a liter of electrolyte straight after a dive, is just alien to most free divers. Maybe coffee, but whiskey? When you're still on the boat? Look, there's no law against it. and whiskey in particular has a kind of work hard, play hard, real men only sort of reputation. But there's another reason someone might drink. I didn't really put two and two together.

I thought, okay, they're drinking. This is weird, but go with it. And then a few conversations I had with people were like, well, you know, it has a diuretic effect, the alcohol. It helps purge your system and it can be used to mask certain substances. That would help if you're going to be tested. And if you're a professional athlete chasing a world record, you could be tested at any time. There's one thing having a glass of wine at dinner in the evening and it's a completely different thing. Smashing neat whiskeys while you're still in your wetsuit, you know, five minutes after you've come up.

Petar made two astonishing performances in cash, earning himself two gold medals and two world records. One of them was a 135-meter dive, the deepest in competition, ever. That's the dive that Mella told me about. I knew who Petal was, and like I said, when we watched the dive, and literally there was only his girlfriend at the time cheering, you know, and a load of other athletes around not cheering. Rumours were happening about athletes doping, but I never really, I didn't even know what doping meant.

I could probably say for the first 10, 12 years, I never even thought once about how doping could be used to advance my free diving. It was just hard work. That was how I was going to advance my free diving. But I think for certain people, if they see I can take substance A and get better, then they'll do it. It's just, it's people. It's got nothing to do with the sport in itself. It's people. So then you get to the question of what is doping? The World Anti-Doping Agency, or WADA, sets the rules on doping and they have a prohibited list. It's a long document outlining nine groups of substances that athletes are banned from using either in or out of competition. You know, the Wadder list is for all sports.

It's not specifically for free diving. And this is where I think it's fallen behind. If you're doping, you're knowingly taking something on that prohibited list. in order to achieve a benefit or advantage. But that list is generic. Physiologically, free diving is unique. There's a running joke in the community that it's 90% mental and 10% in the mind?

To succeed at depth, you basically have to be completely calm and focused, with little or no anxiety. You need a low heart rate, a slow metabolism, and you have to be relaxed. So any stimulants would be a disadvantage. in fact many of the drugs that would enhance performance in other sports simply wouldn't work for us

there was rumours starting to circulate and people were starting to talk about okay if people are doping what are they doping with I'd been told the Croatians were using sedatives specifically benzodiazepines and they're not on the water list benzos are a family of prescription drugs usually prescribed for anxiety

like Valium or Xanax They're designed to increase the effects of something called GABA, a chemical that reduces activity in the areas of the brain responsible for emotion and essential functions like breathing. I started to hear and started to do a bit of my own reading around about what things could help on a free dive, you know. And for me it was a bit scary because it was completely unknown and I wouldn't want to be that first-generation guinea pig.

No way. No way. I wouldn't do that sort of experimenting on myself. It's not worth it. This is not a huge sport where if I win this world championship I can retire on that money, you know? For me, if you're taking a prescribed drug

that is not being used for the purpose that it was made for and you're taking it to enhance your performance, whether it's on the Wada list or not, in my mind is cheating. But they're not banned, so they're not policed by the governing bodies and testing agencies.

So using them to dive as just a matter of individual risk assessment, ethical and moral code. And what I don't want is for everybody to think that they have to take something to be able to compete. Do we have to take benzos or whatever the next drug is going to be if they ban benzos? Is that what we've got to do? Back in 2008, there was a Turkish study published by WADA,

which investigated whether benzodiazepines have a positive effect on the shooting performance in elite archers. it found that they do exert calming effects and reduce anxiety at relatively low doses but concluded that benzodia use does not improve athletic performance in archery but there's no free diving specific medical research available and so far nobody can tell you

not the manufacturers of these drugs or the doctors who prescribed them exactly how they could affect the body at 130 metres deep if you're clear and you don't take any drugs right you're going to feel the anxiety on the surface, you're going to feel what your body really feels like, okay? So your body's going to find a way to mess your dive up if you're not relaxed, if you can't equalize, if contractions come early, because you have all your senses. They're not dumbed down by some drug. And if you're taking stuff, you're going to lose those senses and maybe you're going to find yourself going deeper

because you don't care and end up with a squeeze or some injury or some blackout. You know, who knows? So you're just playing with something you don't really understand. If you haven't heard of a squeeze in free diving, I urge you not to Google it. It's lung damage, a tear in the tissues, which happens when the lungs are rigid

and the diver is tense or makes a sudden movement. If you do see one, you might see a diver. coughing up bright red blood. As for blackouts, they're the brain's shut-off mechanism. They prevent it from having to operate on critically low oxygen. Benzos decrease blood oxygen saturation, which increases the risk of blackout. When it's simple, sedatives affect cognitive function, judgment and coordination.

They will compromise a diver's ability to manage the dive and react to a problem. I mean, if you're prescribed benzos in the UK, you're warned that it's illegal to drive while taking it. It's not just about whether performance-enhancing drugs are fair. It's about safety. Experimenting with benzos or other substances increases the danger when the margin for error is already so small. I've made free diving my life,

and I've sacrificed a lot to be a free diver. So I'm really invested in it. And I care that people get to know the beauty of this sport, and I care that it has a good image, you know. It's really important to me. And I care that people are just safe. My ultimate goal, I just don't want anyone to die. And that's my biggest worry that whenever these big world championships come up,

that someone is going to get hurt, and I don't want that to happen to anyone. And it only has to go badly wrong once. I spoke to an experienced safety diver about this last time I was in Dahub. I asked them, what would happen if, in a competition, repetition, a diver goes deeper than their body is adapted for, and they have a blackout at 45, 50 metres deep, because they're pushing past their limits. Or maybe they tear their lungs at 80 or 90 metres. And the reply I got was, it's the job of a safety diver to bring them to the surface. But the likelihood is you're recovering a body at that point.

This is a small sport, but it's not a drop in the ocean. In 2025, there are an estimated 7 million active free divers, a significant growth in the last few years. The main education bodies reported a 25% increase of new certifications last year alone. The competition world is smaller, but that's a lot of people coming in, watching our record holders, medalists. It matters what they see. It matters what the perceived norms are and how the sports portrayed.

I came away from cash with all the stories crowding my mind, observations, anecdotes, and also my own questions like, why would you knock back spirits to clear your system of a drug that isn't actually banned? Unless there are other things that need to be masked. Back then, everyone was happy to gossip, but only behind closed doors. happened and how it happened and what the truth of the matter got lost in a little bit. Absolutely, if you want to remain off record and not have your name involved, then that's no problem. It's fine if I call you via Instagram, but through the computer.

From the moment I started this investigation, I've been staggered by how many people are keen to talk to me. But I've been more alarmed by how many are scared to be named. Once you get into sort of professional or semi-professional free diving, whether you're instructing, whether you're judging. You know everybody. You know absolutely everybody. Everybody's got some sort of connection. I've already told you how small and integrated the community is.

And when I first started free diving, that was a big part of the draw for me. I idealised it. But there's an uncomfortable side to it too. There are two governing bodies in free diving, Seamass and Ada. If you're a competition diver, it's likely that you're also involved in some way with one or both, are for the organisations? The crossover with judges, with safety divers, with organisers, probably doesn't happen in many other sports.

You know, if a footballer was hanging out with a referee, questions would be asked. Why do you think it's like that? Is it lack of funding or... No, I think it's not professional. It's a sport that's growing from a... grassroots level, and it's almost like rules are being made up as you go along. As you come across a problem, you get another rule made. And we don't know what all the problems are yet. This is

part of what's wrong with competitive free diving, how it's so open to abuse. It feels like no one wants to put their head above the parapet, even the athletes whose podium moments have potentially been stolen. In fact, they're the most scared because their life, they're like, they're livelihood and their reputations are at stake. Nobody wants to speak up. I got told that there was like a group that was forming of people who had decided that Vito Mayor and Petar were doping and they were getting together to discuss it and find a way to do something about it.

Who was in that group? A lot of the top free divers. Donnie Mack is the host of the Free Dive Cafe podcast. Since it started back in 2017, he's recorded around 170 interviews with athletes and coaches, competitors and photographers. It's a nexus for the community, making connections and gathering intel. So it's no great surprise to me that when a private group was formed to address the problems, Donnie was in it.

They started discussing ways to kind of find out if they were doping or not. And then they started to make some... claims about how it wouldn't be possible for Petar to make those kind of progressions or jumps in free diving, which I disagreed with, not verbally, but I was like, these guys, whether you like it or not, are at the cutting edge of free diving as a sport, you know? They may not have the whole Zen-like, yogi-like ethos going on, but they are athletes, unlike we've really ever seen in free dive and really pushed back on them

and this is the conclusion that I eventually came to was like you guys do not have any evidence for these people doping and it's feasible they've got other ways it's feasible they're just better than you we use the term athletes in free diving

but being brutal there are very few free divers who are truly professional in terms of their approach to training or even their technique for the most part it's still pretty amateur So when someone arrives in the free diving community from another sport, especially one with crossover skills,

it's really no surprise that their performances and progress are accelerated. That was the case for the Croatians. Both of them knew how to train hard, bringing a professional approach to strength and conditioning, and that set them apart. Maybe for the pioneers of free diving, it was hard to accept. I'm sorry because, in fact, it took you 15 years or 20 years to get so deep. You were a pioneer in the sport.

When you went to 120 meters, you didn't know if your brain was going to implode or not, you know? They're standing on your shoulders. And we have a much more thorough understanding of free diving physiology and stuff. So who's to say that this phenome of a swimmer couldn't come in and make such a big jump? But there's another angle. But they also know things about like doping and drugs and how to mess with doping tests. There's relatively little money in free time.

diving, so doping tests are limited to urine samples, not blood. And as one athlete told me, they're known as IQ tests, because you have to be stupid to fail them. If you know that you're a closest competitor as doping, or your closest five or six competitors are doping, then the culture of doping develops, you know, and then how do you get rid of it? Good question, because it's true. There's little faith in the system designed to police it, and there's a significant and urgent threat to fair play. So let's assume you're one of the established players in this sport.

You've dedicated your life to it. You've held a number of world records over the years. And then young disruptors come along with an audacious approach and you question their morals. But they are breaking those records, maybe using performance-enhancing drugs, building a brand around themselves and promoting a version of the sport that you do not subscribe to.

A version that glorifies preventable accidents, normalises serious injury. Influences an incoming crowd of young divers. Well, that will change the norms, the power balance. That will upset people. And for one person at least, the answer was to take the law into his own hands. Coming up on episode three of Deepwater. little bit of a pressure cooker situation in that room with the Croatians. I mean, like, Will caught them, whether it's fair or not, he caught them.

Yeah, at one point, they were allegating that they never took benzodiazepine ever, and I was like, ah, I saw it with my own eyes. 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 Amalia Soutland and Madeleine Parr. The executive producer is Bashar Cummings.

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