He is the best-known tricolor freediver in France. Four times world record holder for freediving in constant weight (descent and ascent by the sole force of the flippers or without), Guillaume Néry publishes on Wednesday March 30 a book entitled Nature Aquatic (Ed. Arthaud). In this book, the freediver recounts his accident in 2015 during the world championships, which almost cost him his life due to an error by the organizers.
Basis of his work, this accident leads him to take a step back with his discipline and to withdraw from competition. Without breaking his unfailing need to be one with the sea. However, his relationship to the sea and to apnea is different today. He generously shares it in his book. For franceinfo: sport, Guillaume Néry talks about his passion, his “Art of living“.
Your book opens with the story of your accident in 2015 in Cyprus, where you were close to death. This accident has changed your relationship to apnea and death. How?
Guillaume Nery: A few weeks before my accident, I had felt a kind of anxiety. I don’t believe in premonitions, but I felt something that changed my true understanding of the risk of diving so deep to break records.
This anguish is part of the story of this accident, as if I was preparing myself for it with the various tragedies, the deaths of freediving friends, that I was able to experience in the previous months and years. When I have the accident, it’s the last straw, and I decided to take some distance. At the moment, I put a definitive end to my career. In reality, it was a time when I needed to take a step back, and stop looking for the depths.
And today ?
I am no longer driven by this desire to go to unknown depths in order to break records at all costs. I reconnected with depth because it is still part of me. I redefined my relationship with the sea. It has become very universal. I have a self-sufficient need to go into the water. The idea of performance is no longer the central engine.
This feeling has been accentuated with the confinement where you explain that you have never “retained so little [votre] breath” since you were 14. So the need for the sea and freediving seemed vital to you?
We have all suffered from confinement, from being deprived of freedom and access to nature. This deprivation of being in the water was borderline unsustainable. I was anxious and felt like I was suffocating. It was visceral. This deprivation has confirmed this attachment I have to the sea, and this natural need to be in the sea, without looking for performance.
You broke a world record four times. What is the human limit of the depths according to you?
This is a central issue in our practice. We have always wondered about this limit. In the 1960s, doctors and scientists who studied our sport, explained that the body could not go beyond 50 meters. In the field, the freedivers, Jacques Mayol and Enzo Maiorca, the pioneers who inspired the Big Blue, went beyond. More recently, in seven years, the world record that I was trying to break in 2015 at 129 meters has increased to 131. With the training adjusted, you can always go a meter lower in the end.
We all have a limit at some point, but I believe that we have, in a rather infinite way, this ability to always go a little lower each time. One day, we meet our own limit, either because we no longer have the motivation, or because age prevents us from doing so.
Your story also deconstructs the myth of Big Blue. Why was it important to break this image conveyed by this film and to show the reality of your discipline?
I think it’s a bit the struggle of this whole generation of modern freedivers. When I say fight, be careful because I have nothing against The big Blue in itself. We owe a lot to this film which helped develop apnea. On the other hand, it returns a rather particular image, where the two heroes die because they are obsessed by this desire to go always deeper.
Often people ask me if I don’t want to stay down there, because life would be better there. I always answer: never. Like all freedivers, we love our practice. We try to feel the sensations provided by the great depths and we like the idea of going to explore our own body. We are always happy to go back up because our life is on earth. That’s what I try to explain in the book.
For this sport to develop, it must leave this image of activity reserved for super-men or fish-men. Also, the image of this film depicts an individual practice while apnea is a group discipline.
Your last chapter is a Letter to the sea. In this text, you recall how much you love this environment but above all, you warn about the degradation of the seas and oceans. Do you see yourself as a witness to the consequences of global warming?
Yes, I have been lucky enough to be able to dive for 25 years. I see what is happening, I can testify to it. In apnea, there is a form of bond, of communion with the sea which is much more advanced than with any other practice. We go naked, and we really interact with the element. We develop another relationship with the sea and a feeling of deep respect with the element.
But today, we don’t need to go diving to be aware of all the dramas that are currently being played out. The seas and oceans are in a bad position. Today, there is an urgency, not to avoid a disaster that is coming, but to try to bend the curve of a disaster now.
From April 12, Guillaume Néry will star in the documentary series Mediterranean, The odyssey for lifewhich warns of the need to protect life and living things in the Mediterranean.