Guinness World Records has ratified a new achievement – the longest underwater walk. It involved one Croatian male freewalker, Vitomir Maricic, 37, taking the crown from a younger one, Boris Milosic (24).
Maricic covered a distance of 107m, walking more than four lengths of a swimming pool in Opatija on a single 3min 6sec breath on 17 September last year.
He undertook no special training for the attempt, telling press that, as a professional freediver: “I don’t really need to prepare that much for any breath-hold record.”
He added that he believed he could surpass the feat and had held back only because the event was being watched live, observed by Guinness World Records and freediving governing body AIDA (International Association for the Development of Apnea) – so he wanted to be “careful and precise”.
On a competitive breath-hold walk the freediver is weighted and at least one foot must be touching the bottom of the pool at all times.
Maricic, from the northern Adriatic city of Rijeka, said he hoped to raise awareness of the value of freediving for medical research.
The Croatian is prominent in a number of AIDA official freediving disciplines. He is national champion and ranked second in the world in Dynamic Apnea (horizontal underwater swimming) both with monofin and bi-fins, and seventh in the world in Constant Weight with bi-fins.
Maricic’s walk broke Milosic’s 96m record by a cool 11m, and his time was also half a minute faster than his countryman’s 3min 36sec.
That earlier freewalk in March 2020, reported on Divernet, was itself carried out to wrest the overall record away from a woman, Turkish female freediver Bilge Clingigiray, who had covered 81.6m – in just one minute.
