After descending to a depth of 56m in a frozen lake, Swiss freediver Waldemar ‘Valdy’ Bruderer has claimed a new Guinness World Record for the deepest breath-hold dive under ice without benefit of wetsuit or fins.
His dive, which took place on 27 February, took Bruderer 2min 47sec. The venue was Lake Sils in the Swiss Alps, with its altitude of more than 1,800m above sea level adding to the scale of the challenge. Water temperature was -1°C with air temperature around zero. After the chilling dive Bruderer was able to warm up using a mobile sauna.
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Bruderer, from Zurich, works as an instructor with the Kaluna Freediving school. He started out as a scuba diver before switching to freediving and then coaching in 2018.
His dive has yet to be recorded on the Guinness World Records (GWR) site, and the same is true of an extreme horizontal under-ice dive carried out on 20 March by Russian freediver Ekaterina Nekrasova.
Nekrasova was reported to have swum 122m under the frozen surface of Lake Baikal on one breath, using bi-fins but without thermal protection. For now GWR still attributes this female record to Mandy Sumner of the USA for her comparatively modest 75m swim in Kongsberg, Norway in March, 2024.
The breath-hold swim was carried out as part of the “Under the Ice of Baikal” freediving festival, inaugurated in 2023. Another Russian, Olga Malkina, was reported to have broken her own 63.8m GWR under-ice depth record from four years ago by diving down to 71m using a monofin and wetsuit.
There can often be a long delay while world records are validated, and one peculiar breath-hold feat has just been recognised by GWR some eight months after the event.
This warmwater dive took place on 2 August last year when Egyptian gymnastic freediver Ramy Abdelhamid performed 33 underwater pull-ups on one breath at a site off the Red Sea resort town of Dahab.
The 36-year-old followed a guideline down to his pull-up bar, which had been set in sand at a depth of 9m.
“A lot of people will think it’s easy because you’re pulling yourself up under water so the buoyancy will help you – which is true, but the challenge was actually pushing myself back down,” he told GWR. Securing the record was, he said “a pretty indescribable feeling”.
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