Watch free diving star Alexey Molchanov capture a world record – 60 Minutes

“This one did not stink at all,” mentioned correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi as she gleefully reminisced about her 60 Minutes report, on the sport of no cost diving. The story took her to the Bahamas wherever she profiled the sport’s marquee male athlete Alexey Molchanov for Sunday’s broadcast. 

Molchanov, a 35-calendar year-old Russian, captured his initially globe document additional than a dozen yrs back. Nowadays, he holds 24. 

“I was expecting Alexey Molchanov to be this sort of stern Russian,” Alfonsi informed 60 Minutes Overtime. “His nickname’s ‘The Machine.’ So that makes you think you are heading to be interviewing just one sort of particular person. But he is exuberant, and pleasant, and joyful, and just a ton of pleasurable to be around… usually smiling, which is how he got his other nickname, which is ‘The Golden Retriever.'”

With our 60 Minutes cameras rolling, retrieve is accurately what Molchanov did. Sporting his signature gold wetsuit, he plunged 430 toes into the h2o to fetch a tag connected to a mast that proves the diver achieved their target. Molchanov’s world file dive lasted 4:33. He did it on a single breath.

“You understand how to allow go of stress, of stress, and just, like, appreciate it,” Molchanov spelled out to Alfonsi. “I do these records only due to the fact I can let go. I can delight in the dive. And I can just cease thinking about the time.”

Prior to descending into the depths of the ocean, Molchanov performs “lung packing,” a respiration technique that lets him to inflate his lungs with as much as two gallons of air and stay underwater for minutes at a time. It is a system Molchanov has perfected and just one he wished to teach Alfonsi. 

“I begun off, I consider, underwater, I could keep my breath for 20 or 30 seconds” explained Alfonsi. “And immediately after Alexey variety of taught me these deep respiratory methods, I was able to be in the water keeping my breath for about two minutes.”

Alfonsi is not the only disciple of the Molchanov approach. He and his spouse Elena, a former Olympic swimmer, function a set of freediving universities. They have licensed hundreds of instructors in 20 nations. 

Instructors who are schooling the next technology of free divers. Athletes who keep on to go after and generate the sport’s foremost man.

“I failed to strike my limit,” claimed Molchanov. “I am rather sure the next 10 yrs, the up coming 20 a long time, I will be diving or some of my competition will be diving to 140, 150 meters depth with a monofin… Ten a long time from now, I’m certain there’ll be a thing I will be ready to do, or new era athletes will be ready to do to move… even deeper.”

In the meantime, two a long time appears a far way off for an athlete that is only beginning the key of his profession. Then again, time can be a great equalizer. Probably it is the only matter that can wipe out “The Equipment” and permit a new deal with to substitute Molchanov at the sport’s summit, or in this scenario, the nadir.

The video clip over was originally posted on September 26, 2021 and was manufactured by Keith Zubrow and Sarah Shafer Prediger. It was edited by Sarah Shafer Prediger.