Blue hole, black hole

One Breath: Free-diving, Death and the Quest to Shatter Human Limits. By Adam Skolnick. Crown Archetype; 336 pages; $26. Corsair; £20.

THE death of Nick Mevoli, an American freediver, on November 17th 2013, while competing at Dean’s Blue Hole—a 202-metre-deep funnel of darkness in the Bahamas—is a litany of “if onlys”. If only the 32-year-old from Brooklyn, tired and in pain, had not attempted a dive that day. If only, sensing trouble, he had turned back to the surface sooner. If only his team’s resuscitation efforts had succeeded. “One Breath”, Adam Skolnick’s dissection of an extreme sport and post-mortem of a dive gone wrong, becomes a morality play of hubris, imprudence and obsession.

Free-diving, descending as deep as possible on a single breath, is a niche interest that is more dangerous than any sport other than base-jumping (leaping from a bridge or cliff wearing a wingsuit). Perils include punctured eardrums, embolisms, blackouts and “lung squeezes”. Diving at extreme depths brutalises the lungs, which at a depth of 30 metres compress to a quarter of their normal size. At worst, capillaries and pulmonary vessels rupture and a diver drowns in his own blood.

It took Mevoli, who began his first formal course in free-diving in 2011, slightly more than a year to rocket from being a novice competitor to a record-holder, and that was part of the problem. “The biggest problem with freedivers now is they hurry. They go too deep too fast,” said Natalia Molchanova, possibly the world’s greatest freediver, who drowned last August off the coast of Spain. She was giving a private lesson when she made a dive for pleasure. Not being clipped to a line, she was swept away and never found. Even the best of the best are not immune.

Mevoli grew up in a broken home with a neglectful, self-absorbed father who gave his son a life-insurance policy for his 18th birthday and made himself the beneficiary. Before his parents’ divorce, Mevoli would plunge into the backyard pool of his boyhood home in Florida, surface to check if the angry voices had subsided, and, if not, submerge again.

In free-diving he found solace and self-worth. “Each dive”, Mr Skolnick writes, became “a referendum on his own value.” Mevoli-the-friend was caring and large-spirited. Mevoli-the-competitor was reckless—“cowboyish” a friend said—prone to tantrums, sulks and self-excoriation. “I really liked Nick,” a fellow diver observed. “But I didn’t like him as a competitor. He was exorcising demons from his past and using free-diving to do that.”

It is a haunting tale. To the list of “if onlys” one should perhaps add one more: If only Nick Mevoli hadn’t measured his self-worth in metres. “Numbers infected my head like a virus,” he wrote in a blog post shortly before he died. “The need to achieve became an obsession.” And “obsessions”, he noted, “can kill.”

At 20 metres, the body loses its buoyancy. Pressure builds, the lungs shrink, gravity exerts its pull. The diver goes into free fall, carried ever deeper away from light and into blackness. One imagines Nick Mevoli, young and beautiful—an undersea Icarus falling from the sun, away from friends, family and life.