Picture Credit: Daan Verhoeven (www.daanverhoeven.com)
180m DNF British Record & set at AIDA World Championships in Finland
On Saturday 2 July, Alice Hickson broke yet another national record, in the A-Final at the Individual AIDA Pool World Championships in Turku, Finland, swimming 180m without fins on one lungful of air (over 7 lengths of a 25m pool) and winning a silver medal. Alice held the previous British record of 174m, set at last year’s World Championships in Belgrade, Serbia, for which she won a gold medal. The 180m swim was a personal best for Alice and was just meters short of the winning World Record dive of 185m by Magdalena Solich of Poland. This record marks a fifth for Hickson in a freediving career of just eighteen months!
Alice had this to say of her performance: “I felt more nervous than usual maybe because of other people’s expectations and yesterday wasn’t the best preparation, but I had a little word with myself and reminded myself that it’s not about the numbers of anyone else, just enjoy the dive and come up clean! And it’s still early days this is just the beginning of my freediving journey.”
Two World Records were also broken in the DNF World Championship A-Finals, both by Polish Freedivers, Magdalena Solich and Mateusz Malina, and both spectacular performances and strong. Magdalena swam 185m breaking Natalia Molchanova of Russia’s World record of 182m, set at the AIDA Pool World Championships in Belgrade in 2013. Natalia’s presence at World Championship events is sorely missed she was one of the most loved and revered freedivers to grace the sport of freediving. The icing on the cake for Poland came when Mateusz Malina broke his own World Record of 232m set just a few days earlier, swimming 244m (that’s over 9 lengths of a 25m pool).
For the first time ever in the history of the sport of freediving, people at home could watch the event unfold moment by moment with live streaming and commentary by Carla Hanson (AIDA International President) and Antero Joki (Finnish Freediver & AIDA International Technical Officer). This potentially marks a new era for competitive freediving.