Lia Hyun-Joo Barrett for The New York Times
Nicholas Mevoli was helped Friday in the Bahamas after a free dive, without oxygen or fins. On Sunday, he died after descending more than 200 feet.
LONG ISLAND, Bahamas — As Nicholas Mevoli lay prone, floating in the azure sea, attempting to relax, his exhales were audible. The countdown had begun, and he prepared to dive into Dean's Blue Hole, hoping to reach 72 meters on a single inhalation, with no fins or supplemental oxygen. He began sipping the air, attempting to pack as much oxygen in his lungs as possible.
At 12:25 p.m. Sunday, surrounded by 15 other athletes and observers, as well as five safety divers, he turned and submerged, face first and looking like a human arrow shooting into the darkness on what would be the last dive of his life.
Officials for Vertical Blue, a championship event in the sport of free diving, monitored and announced Mevoli's progress by sonar, and all was progressing smoothly until he had trouble at 68 meters, or about 223 feet, and seemed to turn back. Yet instead of heading to the surface, he decided to dive down again in an attempt to reach his goal and achieve his second American record. A few of his fellow athletes squirmed with discomfort, recognizing that his decision was a dangerous one.
"Diving to that depth with no fins, that's a hard, physical dive," said Mike Board, the British record-holder. "I was thinking, O.K., he's going to have a hard time getting up."
Still, Mevoli shot to the surface under his own power, after a dive of 3 minutes 38 seconds. That's when the scene turned nightmarish.
Mevoli ripped off his goggles, flashed the O.K. sign and attempted to complete the surface protocol that would make his attempt official by saying, "I am O.K." But he wasn't. His words were garbled, his eyes wide and blank. He tipped backward into the ocean and lost consciousness, which, while alarming, is not unheard-of in a sport in which almost all the top athletes have lost consciousness at one time or another, though usually for only a few seconds. Mevoli was not so fortunate.
Five safety divers, one of them an Australian paramedic and all certified in life support techniques, hefted him onto a nearby platform where the event physician, Barbara Jeschke of Germany, went to work trying to revive him.
"There's a problem with his lung," shouted Marco Cosentino of Italy, one of the safety divers who meet the competitor at various stages to help bring him to the surface if he is in distress. They turned Mevoli onto his side, and blood began pouring from his mouth and pooling on the platform before dissipating into the sea.
At first, there was a pulse, at times faint, at times strong. Within 15 minutes, there was none. The team cut off his wetsuit and began cardiopulmonary resuscitation in earnest. Attempts to revive Mevoli, which included three shots of adrenaline at the scene, continued unsuccessfully for the next 90 minutes.
Mevoli, 32, from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, was a relative newcomer to the sport. When he dived to 100 meters in May, he became the first American to break that barrier, unassisted. He used a monofin that day, and completed the feat in 3:45. It is this type of free diving — rather than the variety known as variable weight, which used a sled to take divers deeper than they could ever get on their own — that has exploded in popularity in recent years. Internationally, free-diving schools are multiplying in destinations as wide-ranging as Hawaii, Egypt, Indonesia, Greece and the Bahamas.
Vertical Blue, considered the Wimbledon of free diving, is an annual event that attracts the sport's top athletes. It is held in a unique arena: Dean's Blue Hole, a narrow, 200-meter deep limestone pit, the deepest of its kind in the world. It is set in a cove backed by cliffs that spill into a turquoise bay that laps the shore of an egg noodle of an island that is 72 miles long, home to 4,000 people and under the tourism radar.
This year, 34 athletes came to compete, representing 16 countries, with 26 national records set in the first six days of a competition that was scheduled to end on Tuesday. Athletes compete in three categories: Constant Weight (in which divers dolphin-kick to depth wearing a monofin), Free Immersion (in which athletes pull themselves along a rope down to depth and back to the surface again without wearing fins); and the most difficult event, the one that Mevoli attempted Saturday, Constant Weight Without Fins (where competitors dive without fins at all).
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