Deep Water
The Slow Newscast
Alice Sandelson
4.6 • 894 Ratings
🗓️ 18 November 2025
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Three years ago, travel writer Lydia Gard discovered freediving. An extreme and beautiful sport defined by one objective: to dive as deep as you can on one single breath. It soon became a calling. Then, she stumbled on a darker side of the sport. Rumours that a group of top divers were doping to go deeper. So she decided to investigate.
Reporter - Lydia Gard
Producer - Gary Marshall.
Music supervision and sound design - Karla Patella
Sound design - Rowan Bishop
Podcast artwork - Lola Williams
Fact checking - Poppy Bullard, Katie Gunning, Amalie Sortland, Madeleine Parr & Jess Swinburne
Executive producer - Basia Cummings
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Observer. |
| 0:09.8 | Hello, it's Gary here. I'm a narrative editor at The Observer, and I produce our podcast |
| 0:14.9 | series over on the Tortoise Investigates feed. You're hearing from me today because I |
| 0:20.2 | want to introduce our latest series. |
| 0:22.6 | It's called Deepwater. This particular story started with an email from a travel writer called |
| 0:29.2 | Lydia Gard. She told us how almost by accident she'd fallen in love with free diving during one of her |
| 0:36.3 | writing commissions. It's an extreme but |
| 0:39.7 | beautiful looking sport with a very simple objective. Dive as deep as you can on one single breath. |
| 0:47.6 | Nothing but the air in your lungs, only your body and mind sinking into the depths of the ocean. |
| 0:53.7 | For Lydia, it became a calling and when she first described her euphoric sinking into the depths of the ocean. For Lydia, it became a calling, and when she |
| 0:55.8 | first described her euphoric journey into the darkness of the ocean, it was mesmerizing to listen to. |
| 1:01.9 | The sport is small, but it's growing, and there's a tight-knit community of competitive divers. |
| 1:08.0 | And some of them are now routinely reaching depths of more than 120 meters. |
| 1:13.3 | But then she started to hear the rumors. Allegations that some of the top divers are doping, |
| 1:19.1 | taking performance-enhancing drugs to dive deeper. Some are convinced they have proof, |
| 1:25.0 | others dismiss this as a witch hunt. Either way, it's tearing this |
| 1:29.3 | fragile community apart. So Lydia wanted to know the truth. And now, people who've been too |
| 1:35.6 | scared to speak are ready to talk. Deepwater is our latest series for Tortoise Investigates. |
| 1:41.8 | We've told it over six episodes and you're about to hear part one. |
| 1:46.1 | If you like it and you want to listen to more, just search for Tortoise Investigates and |
| 1:50.3 | follow the feed to hear each episode as it drops. |
| 1:53.8 | Episode two is already available to listen to. |
... |
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