ABOUT POST
Every time I watched gold-medal-winning and world-record-setting Italian diver Alessia Zecchini swim deep under the surface of the ocean with only the air in her lungs in Netflix’s The Deepest Breath, I couldn’t help but think: “Stop doing that!”
And yet, she did not stop. The new Netflix documentary, which began streaming today, depicts Zecchini doing the exact opposite of stopping, as she strove to achieve deeper and deeper free dives, in the name of collecting world records. Zecchini, like so many competitors in extreme sports, was driven to push herself despite the many dangers.
The sport of freediving—aka diving deep under water without an oxygen tank, like scuba divers— which is not in the Olympics, requires athletes to be accompanied by “safety divers,” who will meet the athletes around 20 to 40 meters underwater on their way back up, in case the athlete “blacks out.” This literally means the athletes’ brains shut down. They are hauled to the surface, where their eyes roll and their tongues lull. Don’t worry, they have a few minutes before the brain damage sets in!
Director Laura McGenn provides the audience with hints that Zecchini can be reckless in her drive to set world records for the deepest free drive. That behavior, and the inherently dangerous nature of the sport, finally came to a head in Zecchini’s life in July 2017, when her boyfriend and safety diver Stephen Keenan died rescuing Zecchini from a dive gone wrong, in the Blue Hole, a diving spot in the Red Sea off the coast of Dahab, Egypt.