Famous freediver dies after rescuing woman
Top safety monitor Stephen Keenan ‘was our best’
One of the most trusted men in freediving died last month while rescuing a friend in a dive gone wrong off the coast of Egypt.
Freediving, the sport of swimming to extreme depths on a single breath, without the aid of scuba equipment, isn’t usually undertaken without a team of safety divers. And Stephen Keenan, 39, was widely considered the best.
Freediving rarely gets international attention unless something bad happens. And it appears Keenan’s safety diving was a major reason the sport has enjoyed long periods of obscurity.
“It was almost as if these (athletes) were all his children,” competition judge Francesca Koe said.
On July 22, Keenan was the safety diver for world champion freediver Alessia Zecchini in her attempt to dive through the arch at the blue hole near Dahab, Egypt, in the Red Sea.
“Something went wrong,” said Carla Hanson, the president of AIDA, the international freediving association.
What exactly happened remains unclear — an official report on the incident is forthcoming — but it appears Zecchini went “astray” during the dive, Hanson said. Keenan managed to guide Zecchini to safety, but apparently drowned in the process.
“That had to be what happened, that’s the only thing that makes any sense,” Hanson said.
“I think in this case he saw, he just saw that she was in trouble. Probably, it never even crossed his mind that he was at risk himself.”
The dive Zecchini was attempting would have seen her swim roughly 55 metres deep, to a 26-metre long corridor through a rock wall in the blue hole, then swim up the other side and back to the surface.
The blue hole is, essentially, an ancient cavern with the ceiling caved in, as marine biologist Tom Iliffe said. It looks like a giant, underwater fishbowl made of rock — providing an ideal environment for freediving, free from the turbulence of open water.
Towards the bottom, there is an opening in the rock — likely what was once the mouth of the cavern. That opening, referred to as the arch, provides an underwater passage between the calm waters of the hole and the open ocean.
Keenan’s partners at their Dahab based freediving centre said the dive wasn’t conventional, and cautioned followers of the sport against comparing it with the typical setup at an official freediving competition.
In competitions, athletes are attached to a thick cord, which runs from the surface to the seabed. The sport has different disciplines — depending on whether the diver uses fins to propel down, or weights, or by guiding themselves down the cord. Each diver is assigned a team of safety divers positioned near the surface, where the athlete is most prone to black out.
In rare cases, athletes can black out much deeper below the surface. Keenan held the record for a deepwater rescue, at 40 metres.
In the most common cases, however, an athlete blacks out because the weight of the water when they were at the bottom caused their chest to compress. When they near the surface, their lungs start to expand again and leech oxygen from the rest of the body, causing the brain to shut down.
When that happens, safety divers step in and clench the diver’s airways shut to stop them from swallowing water. At the surface, they call the diver’s name and blow on their face to coax them back into consciousness.
“(Keenan) was our best,” said Daan Verhoeven, a freediver and photographer of the sport. “There was no question about that.
“That’s why it’s such a shock wave in the community.”
While an accomplished freediver in his own right, holding national records in his native Ireland, Keenan was more content to be a supporting character.