Holding their breath for safety
America’s Cup crew gets special training
When Tom Slingsby, a tactician for Oracle Team USA, was asked to hold his breath under water in a swimming pool for as long as he could, he lasted 45 seconds before coming up for air.
Twenty-four hours later, after some instruction and drills, he held his breath for four minutes when asked to repeat the exercise.
It might not seem like an important skill for Oracle sailors to develop since they’re working on high-tech yachts that fly on top of the water, but instruction in freediving is just another way they have prepared for any situation in the America’s Cup.
Working with diving instructors hired by Red Bull, members of Oracle’s sailing team participated in an intense three-day course in Bermuda in August. There was an emphasis on safety,
and the course was also an exercise in team building. The sailors spent hours in the classroom learning technique, theory and safety before trying breath-holds in a swimming pool and then while diving into the Bermuda Sound.
“It was an amazing experience,” said Slingsby, a 32-year-old sailor from Australia who was part of the Oracle crew that won the America’s Cup in 2013. “The biggest thing to me is safety; if we get under the net, you have to control your composure and be able to get out of there alive. That was a huge eye-opener for me. And now I’m so much more confident that if I did get in a tough position, I’ll be OK. I think all of our team are like that. But on top of that, it was so much fun diving down to 40 meters of depth and all the guys learning what the body is capable of with the right training.”
Kirk Krack, founder of Performance Freediving International based in British Columbia, began developing programs for freediving education in 2000. He has taught freediving to special operations military members, movie stars shooting action films and all kinds of Red Bull athletes, from skiers and snowboarders to bigwave surfers and sailors. The course he taught Oracle sailors was a breath-hold survival program.
“In the classroom, we’re basically giving them the education and the element of what is breathholding,” he said. “What is the physiology? Why do you get the urge to breathe? How does the body change and adapt itself ? What are emergency breathholds?
“What we really go into is the safety and problem management because we want to leave them with skills they can practice. There’s an element of risk and danger in everything we do within the water.”
Sailors are acutely aware of the inherent risks of their sport. The America’s Cup Class boat the Oracle team is racing is nearly 50 feet long with a wing height of about 78 feet. The boat’s hulls lift out of the water on hydrofoils, allowing the boat to fly across the surface of the water at speeds of up to 60 mph.
Sailors occasionally slip off the boat and are thrown into the water. Cooper Dressler, a grinder for the Oracle team, estimated that perhaps once a month a sailor from one of the six America’s Cup teams falls overboard. Oracle capsized twice in the two months leading up to the America’s Cup. Fortunately no one was injured.
Safety precautions are taken seriously by all the teams. In 2013, before the America’s Cup held in San Francisco, Andrew “Bart” Simpson, a British sailor with the Artemis team, drowned after he got caught up in wreckage when the team’s boat capsized during training. The boats used in the last America’s Cup were 72-foot catamarans.
For sailors such as Louis Sinclair, 25, the knowledge and skills gained during the Red Bull diving course have clear implications for his job as an Oracle grinder.
If the boat capsized and a sailor was pinned underneath, he would have an air canister to help him breathe, Sinclair said. As part of safety protocol, all of the teams’ crews carry an air canister when they’re sailing in the high-speed yachts. In the chase boat following them, there’s a diver, who is ready to rescue sailors thrown overboard, and a doctor.
Sailors also wear helmets to prevent head injuries and carry knives to cut through ropes or netting should they get tangled up.
“If their leg got caught in a piece of carbon fiber and they couldn’t get it off until the diver could get to them, they’d have to survive with their spare air,” said Sinclair, a strong diver who grew up spearfishing in Antigua. “You get quite a bit out of those bottles, but eventually it will run out. Or maybe you won’t be able to get to it, you never know. … You have to have the ability to hold your breath instantly with a high heart rate.”
Krack, who has a sailing background, taught the course with those kinds of potentially dangerous scenarios in mind.
“I can appreciate the sport and the America’s Cup, but I can also appreciate the hazard, especially at the speeds that they’re moving at with all the rigging,” he said. “They’re taking sailing to the edge at this point, trying to maximize everything they can out of the boat and the crew.”
Part of the course also had a psychological component, during which instructors worked with the sailors on visualization and taught what Krack described as a guided thought process to help them eliminate doubt or fear that might creep in when holding their breath under water for four or five minutes.
Oracle skipper Jimmy Spithill had gone through a Red Bull survival camp with surfers in Bermuda in 2015 and decided a customized program could be built for his team, according to Andy Walshe, director of high performance at Red Bull.
During the course for Oracle last summer, Dressler said he got to the point that could hold his breath for more than five minutes while in static apnea, which is holding your breath under water in a pool while staying still.
When diving in the ocean, Dressler and a few of his teammates reached the maximum depth that the course allows, about 135 feet.
“You learn proper techniques, you learn how to do it safely,” Dressler said. “You really gain an immense amount of confidence. If you’re that confident in something that you’re doing as well as your ability because you’re learning and grasping everything, nervousness doesn’t really come into play. What was so cool about that course was you learn absolute truths about what you’re capable of.
“It blew my mind as to how much we can really push ourselves further than we think we can, and I think it translates into all kinds of things.”