Depth Wish | Deep Water Ep1

Deep Water | Tortoise Investigates

The Observer

True Crime, Society & Culture, Documentary

4.6 • 5.8K Ratings

🗓️ 18 November 2025

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ 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.

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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

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	The Observer
0:07.0	The Observer I've been staring at pictures of that blue hole for my entire free diving life
0:36.1	and dreaming about standing on that beach.
0:39.9	It's almost like you're on stage.
0:42.6	It's like you're in the bottom of an amphitheatre.
0:45.4	So it's a bit imposing in that way.
0:48.1	But once you get in the water, the conditions are so perfect.
0:51.9	It is the best conditions in the world for free diving.
0:55.3	This is a close friend of mine, Gary Magra. I know him because we're both free divers,
1:01.5	drawn to the depth by some strange tug on the soul. The amphitheater he's talking about
1:08.5	is Dean's Blue Hole in the Bahamas. It's the home of Vertical Blue, the most prestigious competition in the free dive calendar.
1:16.6	Our Grand Prix equivalent, or Wimbledon, if you like.
1:20.6	Just underwater.
1:23.6	Holding your breath.
1:25.6	Only the best athletes in the world get to dive there, the ones who
1:30.0	are pushing the limit of what the human body is capable of. And these are our elite divers,
1:35.9	world record holders, champions.
1:38.3	She just has to show the tag, there it is, and she has a fight for! Every can burge on this tiny Caribbean island with a simple goal to see how deep they can dive on a single breath.
1:51.0	Wow, wow, phenomenal.
1:54.0	If you've heard of free diving before, the chances are you've watched the deepest breath on Netflix.
1:59.0	You've probably seen YouTube videos of people coming up from competition dives and blacking out.
2:04.6	It's an extreme sport.
	...

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