And the crowd goes wild.... 'ish

It's been a while since my last post, that's a combination of laziness as well as waiting for a few media articles to come out. A press release was sent out to a few media outlets, chiefly a couple of national papers back in Australia and a couple of magazines. I must say I was quite disappointed by the take up in Aus - Australian media is funny at the best of times, they will happily have half a page in the paper about a neighbour digging a hole in their backyard or a dog that got stuck in a cat flap, but when it comes to something with a bit more substance they don't particularly care. And with freediving in particular they are very strange - with the amount of backard pools in Australia there are a number of drownings each year and so they attribute that to freediving. I remember the local dive store being interviewed once about the dangers of freediving when a kid died doing laps underwater and being egged on by his mates - when he eventually blacked out they thought he was joking and jumped on his back. Tragic stuff but what does that have to do with freediving or apnea? It's that sort of attitude in Australia that holding breath = death that really stifles any media attention. Do I sound bitter enough yet? It happens quite a bit here in the UK too - I remember in October 2007 England had a horrible sport weekend - amongst other things they lost the Rugby World Cup to South Africa and Lewis Hamilton choked and lost his world championship. However the spark of the weekend was that Sara Campbell had nailed 3 world records in 3 consecutive days, a feat never achieved by anyone, let alone a Brit. Back in London the weekly Sport Magazine had a column for "good week for, bad week for" which had one sentence on Campbell. A few pages on there was a full page story on a 15 year old that was playing ping pong in China. No wonder this country's screwed at sport (whoops, did I just say that??). Anyway whinge over....

One article that did make it to press in Aus was my local paper, which was a strange little experience. Late one night I was on Skype talking to Mum and Dad and I mentioned that there might be something in the paper to watch out for. After a bit we said goodbye and I was just about to shut the computer down when Mum rang back and said that a reporter was on the landline and was asking questions about me. She told the reporter I was online and she would call me so he could ask questions. So before I could figure out what was really going on, he would ask Mum a question, Mum would repeat the question to me, then hold the home phone up to her computer speakers so the reporter could hear my responses. So in effect I was being interviewed by Mum. In freediving context i've been interviewed in the past by BBC Radio, i've been live to air on Egyptian television but being interviewed by my mum was the single most weird thing i've had to do in a long time.
Mum: Are you worried that something will go wrong and you'll die Ben?
Ben: Ummm, errrr... no mum, i'm not going to die
Mum: It's a very dangerous sport isn't it Ben?
Ben: ummmm... well.... not really if you have proper safety in place which we alwa...
Mum: But haven't some people died?
Ben: ah... (sweating) there have been a couple of incidents..

Anyway you get the point.... some things you don't really want to explain to your mum. The article ended up quite good - a couple of misquotes here and there and a couple of "death defying crazy extreme sport" kind of references but i'd always be surprised if they didn't put that angle on it. And they used a great photo from Laura Storm so it was great to see her awesome photography getting another plug. Mum and Dad were a bt chuffed because they sent a photographer around to the beach to take a photo of them. I think until that point they thought it was all a bit of a joke. They were loving it when the paper came out - people were stopping them in the street so they had a bit of celebrity status for a couple of weeks, bless 'em.

Click on the article to read.


In the March edition of Diver Magazine there was an article on both Mark and I. The main focus was on Mark which understandable as it was supposed to be focusing on the British side of things. But I got a mention so it goes on the list.





On the internet there were a couple of bits and pieces, including Deeper Blue, an international underwater website and the Diver magazine online. Here's a couple of them:

http://www.deeperblue.net/newsfull.php/1665

http://www.britishfreediving.org/

http://www.divernet.com/cgi-bin/articles.pl?id=6680&sc=1080&ac=d

http://altsaint.blogspot.com/2007/12/dahab-depth-demons.html

Matt Kitchen provided some superb footage that he edited together, here is the YouTube version:






Finally, here are some of the links to photos around the traps - you may recognise some already as i've borrowed extensively:

Mine
http://flickr.com/photos/79809474@N00/sets/72157603440321152/

Sam Kirby's
http://flickr.com/photos/samdive/sets/72157603431512309/

Laura Storm's
http://flickr.com/photos/rebel-angel/sets/641988/?page=4
These are spread around a bit so if you get lost go here http://flickr.com/photos/rebel-angel/sets/641988/ and they should be around page 4 or so. Well worth searching around though.