Hungarian Zsofia Torocsik has become the first female freediver to swim the full six lengths of an Olympic-sized pool in competition under water on one breath.
Competing in the Dynamic With Fins (DYN) monofin event at the Chengdu World Games in China, Torocsik set an absolute women’s world distance record of 300m.
Her feat came on 11 August, the day after the woman who had previously held the DYN record, Julia Kozerska from Poland, had broken her own CMAS Dynamic No Fins (DNF) record with a 222.5m dive. Kozerska’s earlier record, set in Athens in May, had been 214m, and she also holds the 213m AIDA record.
Torocsik smashed Kozerska’s previous DYN record of 284m, also set in May. The six-length swim took her exactly four minutes, a measured 40 seconds per lap.
At the World Games she also swam a distance of 212.5m in the DNF event, adding a silver to her gold medal and setting a new Hungarian record in the no-fins discipline.
The former triathlete had already claimed a new DYN record in July, when she covered 280m at the 34th AIDA Freediving World Championship at Wakayama in Japan, with ratification pending. The 277m AIDA record was set by Magdalena Solich-Talanda of Poland in 2022.
Torocsik switched to freediving following her decade-long triathlon career only two and a half years ago. She had reportedly become disillusioned with competitive swimming, but then a holiday in Malta in October 2022 led her to snorkelling and enjoying the experience of duck-diving onto the 20m-deep P-31 shipwreck.
Within 18 months, and supported by the Budapest-based nOxygen Apnea Club, she ranked fourth in the world in women’s DYN.
