20 The Times Magazinelenka Artnik is a professional
freediver. She can hold her breath
for seven minutes and, wearing
just a neoprene wetsuit and
carbon-fibre monofin, reach ocean
depths where it is darker than
midnight and barometric pressure
squeezes her body like a sponge,
causing her arteries to constrict
and her lungs to shrink to the
size of tennis balls.
Artnik competes in a form of freediving
known as the constant weight discipline
(CWT). Whereas some divers will make use
of heavy sleds to help them descend and
air-filled balloons to help them return to the
surface, CWT divers must swim down and
back up again under their own power. Their
discipline is, as a result, considered the purest
and most prestigious form of the sport.
Yet for all the physiological strain involved
it is perhaps, above all things, an exercise
in calm and control. To excel at this type of
diving, you must be able to enter an almost
Zen-like state as you begin your descent. The
very act of thinking wastes valuable oxygen,
while fear – even if just a fleeting doubt – will
cause your heart rate to rise, increasing the
risk of blackouts. To freedive is to enter a cold,
counterintuitive world that most of us are not
remotely equipped to handle. The statistics
underline this: the number of people who have
made it to depths of more than 100 metres
(328ft) in this way is far fewer than the
number of people who have spacewalked.
And no woman has ever gone deeper than
Artnik. In July last year, she set a record of
122m in the Bahamas. Using her monofin
and “dolphin kick” technique, she swam like
a mermaid to a depth of 80m, then stopped
moving altogether and allowed momentum
to carry her the remaining distance. After
grabbing a Velcro tag attached to a plate
suspended at her target depth, she turned
around and kicked her way back towards
sunlight, her eyes shut, her face still and
expressionless, like someone in a deep,
enchanted sleep. The underwater footage of
her completing the dive is both moving and
eerie. “When I’m free-falling, the sensation is
beautiful,” she says. “I feel like I’m just this
drop in the ocean. I feel like I belong there.”
Artnik is 40, but even a few years ago she
was a virtual unknown. She arrived at the 2016
World Championships in Turkey having only
taken up the sport in earnest the previous
year. Representing Slovenia, she promptly broke
two CWT records. “People were like, ‘Who
is this girl?’ ” says Artnik, smiling. “It was a
surprise.” In the days that followed, she found
herself approached by the coaches of other
nations, who regarded her with puzzlement
and peppered her with questions. “‘How were
you able to do that? How do you train? Whatdo you do?’ They were very interested. They
wanted to know where I had come from.”
These are reasonable questions. How does
an anonymous Slovenian woman in her mid-
thirties just show up and dominate one of the
most psychologically demanding pursuits ever
conceived by humans? To answer this properly
takes some time, however, and requires us to
understand that, rather than being defined by
Zen-like calm and control, the first three decades
of Artnik’s life were the opposite. Instead, grief,
trauma and feelings of hopelessness dominated.
More than once, she had considered killing
herself. One night, in 2010, Artnik found
herself standing on a bridge in the Slovenian
capital of Ljubljana and peering down at
the dark water beneath her, weighing up
whether to jump. “For so many years, I was
very, very unhappy. I was drowning,” she says.
“Drowning deeper and deeper and deeper.”
Artnik is slim, with fine features and dark
hair pulled back into a tight ponytail. She is
open, warm and prone to a poetic turn of
phrase, particularly when describing either
the sensation of being in the water, or the
struggles that had dogged her for so long.
She now lives near Geneva with her
partner, Florian Burghardt, who works in
finance but is an accomplished freediver
himself. But she grew up in the port of Koper,
a Yugoslavian city which, in 1991, became part
of the new country of Slovenia. Artnik lived in
an apartment with her parents and her older
sister and half-brother from her father’s first
marriage. Her father, Franc, was a plumber. He
was also an alcoholic who, later in life, would
be diagnosed with borderline personality
disorder. Her brother, Simon, was a decade
older than her and became addicted to heroin
while she was still in primary school.
Between them, father and son made the
small apartment a crucible of chaos, uncertainty
and strife. Franc would regularly go missing.
“And so me, my mum and sister would have
to go out at night looking for him, because
he didn’t come home and we knew he’d be
drunk somewhere,” she says. “Or we’d have the
police coming to our home because they were
looking for my brother. That was normal.”
Explosive arguments would prompt
Artnik to retreat to her bedroom with her
cat, Snezinka – Snowflake – whom she would
cuddle and whisper to. When she was ten, her
parents divorced, though Franc continued to
live in the apartment. Money was perpetually
tight. At night, she would hear her mother
weeping and worry that she was going to kill
herself. “I had a father who was an alcoholic,
a brother who was a drug addict and my
mum probably wanted to end her life several
times. Because being in between those two
was a horrible nightmare.”
She became the quietest, smallest part
of this dysfunctional unit, absorbing all thestress and responsibilities while her own needs
were entirely overlooked. “I never had space
in my family,” she says without bitterness.
“Because of all these crazy people around,
taking all the space and attention.”
Though a hard-working and conscientious
student, she was never once asked by her
parents what, for example, she might like
to be when she grew up. Amid the chronic
instability of the apartment, such dreamy,
abstract conversations served no practical
function. “There was never a question of,
‘What am I going to do with my life?’ The
only question was survival.”A
Fewer people can reach
depths of more than
100 metres the way
Artnik does it than
have spacewalked
Artnik moments before her record-breaking dive of 114m in Sharm
el-Sheikh, Egypt, November 2020NANNA KREUTZMANN, DAAN VERHOEVEN
Artnik on Long Island in the Bahamas, photographed by her
partner, fellow freediver Florian Burghardt