The Best American Sports Writing 2011 (4 page)

Kumaritashvili had struggled all week to stay on his sled during training and already had crashed once. His final run, though, was proceeding reasonably well until he came late out of Curve 15, which sent him late into the finish curve and up toward the top of the wall, where the G-forces made him lose control.

"Once this happened," said Svein Romstad, secretary general of the International Luge Federation, "he was literally at the mercy of the sled."

Kumaritashvili came rocketing down, slammed into the opposite wall, and was catapulted out of the track and into a steel pole. It was terrible luck, but it was also an example of what can happen when physics and inexperience meet.

It was the first fatality on an artificial track in 35 years and it prompted the federation to make significant changes before yesterday's men's event. The starting line was moved down to where the women begin, the outer wall was raised at the point where Kumaritashvili went over, and the ice profile was changed. So the competition will be safer, but it can never be safe.

The Olympic motto, devised by founder Pierre de Coubertin himself, is "Faster, Higher, Stronger," and the Whistler track was designed to be the fastest on the planet. The Germans, who have dominated the sport for decades, love it. U.S. slider Erin Hamlin, the women's world champion, has proclaimed it fun.

But one thing that the true amateurs learn immediately is that there is no steering wheel or brakes on a luge sled and no safety nets. Even at Olympus, speed kills.

FROM ESPN THE MACAZINE

E
VEN BEFORE HE WAS A FREE-DIVER
, Herbert Nitsch dreamed he could stay underwater. He wouldn't need a fish's gills or tanks filled with oxygen. In his dreams, he could live underwater as he did on land—could live a better life, maybe even a perfect one. Hidden below the ocean's surface, he could move effortlessly in three dimensions and know the freedom of birds without having to fly. All he had to do was trade liquid for air.

Today, sitting on a sailboat just off the Greek island of Crete, feet dangling in the blue water, Nitsch is as close to that dream as he has ever been. (When he is near water, he must touch it, if only with his toes.) He is 40 years old, long and lean, having shaped his body into a near-perfect submersible, efficient and technically sound. He has conducted experiments on it, unraveled its mysteries. Through trial and error, says the Austrian, he has glimpsed its truest potential and believes he has not yet reached it. Already, he has set 31 free-diving records, including the most reason-defying, for "no limit" diving, in which a person uses any means available to dive as deeply as he can on a single breath. In 2007, Nitsch strapped himself to a sled weighted with 180 pounds of lead, filled his lungs with air, and disappeared into blackness off the Greek isle of Spetses, dropping 702 feet—almost as deep as Rockefeller Center is tall—before returning to the surface alive. He believes that within a year or two, he will dive 1,000 feet—that is, from the top of the Chrysler Building to the sidewalk, then back to the tip of its antenna.

Dreams are not enough at that depth. There are limits to the power of belief. Nitsch is a man of evidence, of science and measurements, of math. (In his spare time, he is a commercial pilot for an Austrian airline.) And through his trials, he has come to see one body part as crucial to his arithmetic: the spleen. His spleen is no different from your spleen: a mottled purple and gray organ about the size of your fist, on the left side of your abdomen between your heart and diaphragm. Its function is somewhat mysterious but includes the filtering of blood and the recycling of iron. Inside, small pockets called sinusoids collect oxygen-rich blood while it awaits processing. For every 33 feet a person descends underwater, organs are burdened by an extra 14.7 pounds of pressure per square inch. (When Nitsch reached the bottom of his record dive, the equivalent of an NFL lineman was sitting on each of his eyeballs.) Right around the time a diving Nitsch needs air, his spleen is squeezed by that pressure, forcing the oxygen-rich blood into his arteries like water from a sponge. Most of us associate liquid with drowning. But in his spleen, Nitsch sees a breath we never knew we had.

If the idea sounds crazy—our spleen as a third lung—know that Nitsch is, in fact, alarmingly rational. He is quick to point out that one of the ocean's greatest swimmers, the seal, can remain submerged for more than an hour in part because of the enormous capacity of its giant, enviable spleen. Nitsch believes blood squeezed from his own spleen can sustain him through the most difficult parts of his dives. In that fist-size organ, he sees remarkable adaptability and a reason to believe humans, like seals, are purpose-built to dive. "I don't think we know what we're capable of," he says in accented English. "In free-diving, we're still in the pioneering stage. The Wright brothers were once where we are. Now look how well we fly."

When asked what's too deep, what's an impossible depth to dream of reaching, Nitsch shrugs. "Something like 1,000."

Meters, he means. More than 3,000 feet.

Yesterday, Nitsch went spearfishing with some Greek friends. The Greeks, sponge collectors and fishermen, are legendary for their underwater lives. Yet they watched dumbfounded when Nitsch—tall and thin with a shaved head, black wetsuit, and long fins, a torpedo come to life—easily dropped 150 feet for minutes at a time. Nitsch has spent so much time underwater he has learned the body language of fish, acting timid or jumpy to attract their curiosity.

He has always been at home there. His father was an ardent sailor, and they spent a lot of time together touring the world's oceans. Nitsch became a snorkeler, then a scuba diver. He became an accidental free-diver when, in 1998, on a diving trip to the Red Sea, the airline lost his gear. Rather than squander a vacation on dry land, he decided to hold his breath and go for it. By week's end, he had hit 106 feet. He had no idea he'd missed the standing Austrian free-diving record by just over six feet, but he was sure about what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.

Even without the advantage of a lead-packed sled, he has already dropped a record 407 feet in the free-diving discipline known as constant weight, a giant fin attached to his feet. And though he no longer holds the record for simple breath-holding, he did once, staying underwater for 9:04 in 2006. He felt not the slightest urge to inhale until well past six minutes.

The Greeks posed for pictures after their time together. They asked why he does what he does. His answer: diving gives him pure joy, an otherwise unknowable freedom. And so down he must go. For them, watching him in the water, so effortless, he becomes something otherworldly. And yet he is built like the rest of us. Only his dreams are different.

"My body is just like everybody else's," Nitsch says. "My lungs may be slightly bigger, but everything else is the same. So yes, sometimes I ask myself, Why can I do these things when others can't? The truth is, it's no longer physical."

 

Nothing burns oxygen like panic. A few years ago, Nitsch went exploring with a friend deep inside a cave outside Vienna. Each carried a small emergency oxygen tank because some parts of the expedition led underwater, requiring them to hold their breath and swim. The cave's water was turgid, the light low, and in the darkness Nitsch's friend panicked. He quickly ran through his own tank and most of Nitsch's. Beneath the earth's surface, with only a few sips of air remaining, Nitsch wasn't sure they would make it out. But after they completed that terrifying exercise in stamina and will—"We just had to make it," Nitsch says matter-of-factly—he was overcome with relief. Not because he survived, but because he had learned what he needed to do to live without air.

"You must be absolutely calm," he says. The cave taught him the value of an economy of movement, of strapping a governor to emotion. It taught him he needed to dive as deeply inside himself as he dreamed of diving into the sea. He needed a new serenity.

Since the scare in the cave, he has become very good at slowing the processes of his body. Before his deepest dives, Nitsch enters a meditative state, a kind of trance. "I've trained myself to leave the situation," he says. At the surface, he inhales and exhales giant breaths several times over, approaching hyperventilation to rid his body of the carbon dioxide that triggers the body's inhalation reflex. Meanwhile, his brain begins to narrow focus. Sometimes, his tunnel vision is so intense, Nitsch experiences an out-of-body sensation. "Hydrodynamics and aerodynamics are not that different," he says, and that morning off Spetses he felt himself floating in the sky rather than the water. His brain carried him above the scene, high enough to see himself, breathing in, breathing out, along with everyone watching him, their boats floating in the water. He felt as though he were watching someone else about to attempt the impossible, and he went slack.

Nitsch conserves oxygen in many ways. He fasts for a day before a big dive; digestion burns oxygen. (Those gases also cause a particular danger: on steep ascents, a trapped fart can blow teeth out a diver's nose.) Rather than wear a mask, which would need to be equalized—the air inside it would painfully compress without more precious air exhaled into it—Nitsch built himself a pair of glasses. Made of fiberglass, with small, thick lenses, they allow him to check his depth gauge and spot the guide rope he follows into darkness, to see as clearly as with a mask, but with the sea flowing freely over his eyes.

Most important, Nitsch has perfected something called bloodshifting, an elaborate predive preparation commonly practiced by expert free-divers to trick the body into thinking it's drowning. When the brain believes the body is going to die, Nitsch has found in caves and other dark places, it becomes coldly efficient. Nitsch promotes bloodshifting by making preliminary dives with empty lungs, up and down and back again, before his real effort. In response, the human body—his body, your body—takes blood from its extremities and packs it into its core. The same reflex occurs naturally when you are cold, which is why when temperatures dip, fingertips are the first part of you to go numb. In either instance, starving your arms and legs of blood saves oxygen. In Nitsch's case, it also prepares his body for the pressure it is about to bear. Blood is pushed into the labyrinth of vessels in his lungs, and just as it's harder to crush a full can than an empty one, that blood protects his lungs from being ruptured by the weight of deep water. He can feel it happening, can imagine transforming into an aquanaut. Sitting at the surface, waiting for the word "go," Nitsch knows his body is doing everything it can to make his dreams come true. He is at peace then, just another stone waiting to sink.

 

Herbert Nitsch is lying to himself. There are some limits he cannot transcend. Because he can go so deep for so long, he risks decompression sickness each time he ascends, nitrogen bubbling out of his blood and into his brain and joints—the bends. That same nitrogen inevitably causes nitrogen narcosis on the way down too, starting at around 100 feet. There's nothing Nitsch can do to duck it. As alcohol affects people differently, divers respond to "getting narced" in their own way. Some feel happy, some tense. Some feel liberated, some trapped. For Nitsch, narcosis "is just a bitch," making him feel out of control on every dive, as though everything is about to slip from his grasp, a terrible feeling when you're riding nearly 200 pounds of lead to the bottom of the sea.

Still, the greatest threat to a submerged Nitsch has nothing to do with nitrogen. It has nothing to do with his brain or his heart or his lungs. It has to do with the ears and the reality that we are limited in the depths we can reach by their delicate architecture. What keeps Nitsch from reaching 1,000 feet is a mere fraction of an inch thick: the translucent tympanic membranes in the auditory canals otherwise known as eardrums.

It doesn't take much pressure to burst an eardrum. If you go swimming and don't equalize your ears by plugging your nose and pushing air into your Eustachian tubes, the weight of the water knocking on your door can snap that thin membrane at a dozen feet, give or take. It has never happened to Nitsch, but he knows it's an extraordinarily painful sensation. In cold water—and deep water is always cold water—it can also be deadly. When cold water rushes in, your ears' mechanics cramp and seize, affecting your sense of spatial awareness, including the sense of up and down. You don't know which way points toward permanent blackness and which way points toward light. Eventually, your body will warm the water trapped inside your head, and your ears will relax, opening up the world to you once more. By then, though, your lungs will have opened up too, and the water in your ears will be low on your list of concerns.

The only way to counter this danger is to pressurize the inside of your ears. But Nitsch's lungs—your lungs—only hold a finite amount of air. And when that air is compressed the deeper he travels, there is less and less to push into his Eustachian tubes. Eventually, he runs out. He always runs out. And always at the moment his eardrums inform him they're about to break.

He has searched for every known fix. In addition to conserving air, Nitsch takes in as much as he can. For his final breath, he practices what free-divers call packing: taking a normal breath, then 30 or so small swallows of air to fill every nook and cranny of his respiratory system with oxygen. Once below water, he stops his weighted sled at around the 75-foot mark and expels that stored air, through a tube, into a plastic Coke bottle. (These are the homespun instruments of a pioneering profession.) As he continues to descend, he takes sips from the bottle whenever his ears cry out. At depth, it is easier to sip air from a bottle than to squeeze it from crushed lungs.

It's also one more mind trick Nitsch is playing, fooling his brain into thinking he's actually breathing, even if the air he's taking in has already been stripped of oxygen. It's the same as a thirsty man spitting back a glass of water without swallowing it; he would feel as if he were drinking, but his body would be drying out all the same. The charade can't go on forever, maybe not even as far as 1,000 feet. The air in the Coke bottle may protect his eardrums, but packing expands the esophagus, restricting blood flow to the brain. To prevent a blackout, Nitsch's body amps up his heart rate, which burns a lot of oxygen. What air gives him, it also takes away.