I’ve been thinking a lot about the subject of doping in freediving ever since the bubble burst last July, and I often get entangled in sometimes constructive and some other times absurd conversations with different people about the subject. The most common (and dumb) argument I encountered is “Who is to say what’s doping and what’s not? What about supplements, creatine or ashwagandha? Arent these also doping if they improve performance?”
So, what’s doping?
Since you are undoubtedly dying to know my opinion, here you go: I believe it’s not cheating to use any supplement, food, compound that is both: 1-widely available and sold without prescription AND 2- it’s something good for your health, or at least it’s not harmful to the human body.
So for example, if vitamin C gives me 10 extra meters (while at the same time it improves my immune system and my iron absorption) then not only it is ok to take it, but everyone else should take it too, at which point we will be back to an even playing field.
But if “vitamin Z” gives me 10 extra meters and also causes hallucinations, or cancer, or Alzheimer, and I decide to take it anyways, I am leaving you with 2 options, both of which are bad: you either accept to lose to me, or you are “forced” to take vitamin Z too, putting also your life at risk to even out the gap with me.
Which drugs are we talking about?
There’s a bunch that we know of (and I’m sure there’s more that only few know about), but it is generally drugs that you cannot buy over the counter; in fact you need a prescription (for a disease that you don’t have) so you have to lie to a doctor to get hold of them (or have a complicit doctor with no ethics), and take them in ways and dosages that are not intended for.
The infamous benzos
Benzodiazepines (BZD or also benzos) is the most talked about drug after several boxes of it was found on some freedivers luggage at VB. Well, after people started comparing notes, it turns out that its use is widespread and people have been taking it quite liberally and some coaches have been recommending it to students as supplements (I kid you not and I’ll add here a snippet of an excel file that was sent around by a well known coach, check the text in red. In case you are wondering, yes, that is an extremely high dose, so dont try this at home).
So what are Benzos for? It is only a doctor’s or psychiatrist’s job (and never your coach) to prescribe it when you suffer from very severe conditions, like a bout of severe depression, or feel suicidal or to help you sleep during a period of acute insomnia. A responsible doctor should explain to you that this is not a long term medication, in fact it should be prescribed only for very short term (10-15 days) to give you a break while trying to get over your temporary crisis and start functioning again on your own, or while you are waiting for your long term anti-depressive or anti-anxiety meds to kick in. I think it is safe to say that most people take them without even knowing in which way they affect their brains.
Usually past 2 weeks of being on benzos your body/brain starts to become tolerant: that means that you will need bigger doses to achieve the same calming effect, and that is when the addiction starts. If you stop taking them your body panics and you get severe withdrawal symptoms.
Let’s be very clear, you are not even supposed to drive your car while you are on the stuff, and yet, a bunch of geniuses think it’s totally innocent to be freediving to 100+ meters while under the effect. I’m sure I dont need to comment any further on the reason why it is a stupid idea to take this shit and go do a max dive.
After the case of benzos blew wide open during last Vertical Blue, many freedivers signed a petition to plead for the addition of this drug to the WADA list (the official list of prohibited substances in sports), but there was/is a lot of resistance against it, for both political and financial interests and because objectively it is a massive pain in the ass for WADA to change the list, add relative testing and enforce it, especially for a stupid fringe sport that only 0.05% of the world population know about.
In fact the benzo problem doesnt really touch any other sports, because being under its effect is very damaging to athletic performance and brings zero benefits. Except in freediving, where a strong and trained body is only important if there an even stronger mind behind it. But if the mind isn’t strong then it’s very tempting to put it into zombie mode with artificial means, which is what benzos do.
So this is where we are now. Taking benzos for freediving is the cheating equivalent of taking stimulants in other sports. But stimulants are in the WADA list while benzos are not, because freediving does not have its dedicated WADA list (in fact 90+ % of all the WADA list drugs would only damage freediving performance instead of enhancing it).
Benzodiazepines in freediving is only one of the problems, there are other drugs that aren’t in the list and that can improve performance,
here below a link of an article that came out recently, but in fact there are possibly a lot more substances that only a handful of freedives use and know about, while the rest of us fools break our asses in the pool & gym with actual training.
To conclude, it is sad to see how many people do not care and dont speak up, because (despite declaring their love for freediving) they are not being negatively affected by the douchebags using PED’s (performance enhancement drugs); in fact, if you sit on 10th or 20th position in the ranking (or in the world championship results), your position wouldn’t change much even if half the people ahead of you were doped: there would simply be a shuffle of positions at the top but past a certain point everything would stay the same. Which is what we have seen at the latest Aida World Championship in Cyprus this year (and most likely there was a fair amount of that happening also in the CMAS world championships in Roatan). So at the moment it looks very much like the only people who really care are only the people that are directly affected and who are losing medals and titles to the cheaters.
What can we do?
There is a new petition coming out shortly, this one has been “suggested” by WADA, if they see that a lot of freedivers want things to be more fair, safe and regulated then they are willing to evaluate our request. That means that you should sign the petition BECAUSE IT IS THE RIGHT THING TO DO, even if it doesnt benefit or touch you directly. The only excuse you have not to sign it is that you are one of them phonies. Or maybe you wanna see one of them dying on the Diveye stream.
Lastly, buy a T-shirt and wear it at every freediving meets, comps, club training to help us spread the message.
(Send me a message and I can arrange it, T-shirt + delivery in EU @20 euro, it you order a couple it’s cheaper because delivery for 1 or more cost the same).
Well said!