Media friendly competition freediving vs. "pure" freediving

[Andrew the fish]

Freediving competitions on TV? That would be one boring show. Imagine row of bodies floating limp on a surface minute after minute... shshsh... this is intense head to head battle, folks. Where can we fit spectacular crushes with wheels and parts flying, stretchers and all that juicy part? No black eyes here either.

On the other hand, think about difference between rugby and american football. Beautiful authentic rugby, real man's game, has been bаstаrdized into something lame and pathetic just for the sake of making a show out of it.

 

[Will]

Kars, the system you drew is more or less exactly what we will be using for Project Hector, except ours will stay at max depth and have a pannable video camera (with live feed to surface). If it works well we will use it at VB and all depth events here.

 

[Kars]

Thanks for your reply,

Will, notice that the shape of the camera sled is triangular, ensuring less friction and rotation causing horizontal movement towards or away from the competition line.
weighted guiding tubes and a rotatable connection with the triagular 'beam' could also help to ensure an absolute vertical drop, in current less water.

Do you mean pannable as in vertical movement, similar to what my drawing suggest?

Maybe you want to comment on the idea that freedivers may or may not have the clarity of mind to turn at depth upon hearing a dive alarm?
And the other ideas?

Thanks for chiming in, and all the best with your great, great Hector project!

 

[Will]

The panning on our rig is a vertical tilt, from a 'looking up the line towards the surface' angle to a 'down to the plate' angle.

I wouldn't like to speak for all depth freedivers, but personally I try to avoid any kind of decision making during the performance, especially at max depth. If there are various possible courses of events then I'll use contingent programming to decide beforehand what I'm going to do in each scenario - this way the subconscious is programmed, and you can still operate on 'autopilot.'
So in a competition with no bottom plate it wouldn't really change much how I dive - somehow I seem to hear depth alarms pretty clearly, and I would just use that to program my turn at a predetermined depth.

 

[fflupo]

would a laser work in the water?

does anybody know, imagine what kind of tracks and shows you could create

....

 

[_Aaron_]

I'm a newbie spearo and in now way involved with competition, but this thread was kind of interesting for me to think about.

Of course you could keep the traditional events without many changes, but consider how many derivative events you can come up with using some "fixed course". For example, why not a 30 or 60 second static followed immediately (no breathing allowed) by a 100m (150m, 200m, etc) dynamic in a race format. That could be exciting and challenging.

Or, fixed depth dives, where the competitors have to complete some sort of task at depth. Or, taking the relay race format, teams have to take turns carrying flags of a particular color down to a fixed depth, attaching them in exchange for another color. When that diver reaches surface the next goes, and had better not pick the wrong color at the bottom!

From my experience swimming and running as a kid. People tune in for the excitement of the short events, and while they may not watch the long events intently, the excitement from the short events keeps them tuned to see the highlights and results of the long events.

 

[Kars]

Hi FFlupo,

I don't expect much from laser light, since we don't even see the big dive lights in clear water beyond 30-50m distance.
The blue laser would yield best results though, followed by green and I expect very poor performance from the red.

Hi Aaron,

Thanks for chiming in, and your creative idea's.
But.. I think technical game additions will unnecessary complicate the sport. In my view these game expansions are distractions that take away from the simple purity of having a single man alone challenging himself in the depths of the ocean, seeing how deep one can go on single breath.

The surface protocol for me is a compromise that is worth having because it helps to prevent a good bunch of BO's, and demonstrating that athlete is self-sufficient.

 

[Mullins]

Finding ways of concealing the 'baseplate' (which could be replaced with a different kind of stopping mechanism) and having a clearly marked scale next to the athlete would make for good viewing. It'd be good to have tags available all the way down too, so there was no clear target for audiences to see - they'd just see an athlete going "as far as they could" and picking up the deepest tag before heading up. It would appear less controlled and more down to individual performance on the day, which is what makes sport interesting. Nomination system could be managed in the background, purely for safety purposes. With decent video footage I think it could be just as compelling as, say, the track and field events. Possibly more so, given the danger aspect. It'd never compete with team sports but nobody's expecting that anyway. Commentary would make a big difference.

I don't think there's anything inherently boring about freediving - the challenges are just logistical. Imagine if videos of the track and field events were done to the same standard and in the same manner as the current freediving ones, i.e. just showing a performance to some music. Boring as hell if you're an outsider. Yet the quality footage, context, uncertainty, commentary etc that you get at large events like commonwealth and olympic games makes those sports very watchable.

Sounds like Will's system is a big step in the right direction.

 

[sgnips]

hi all
we are currently trying to build a new style of competitions in freediving with the (refurbished) Apnea Academy Trophy
as i wrote months ago, it is a team competition circuit, mostly dedicated to beginners but its form is surely suitable for higher levels athletes

we have been trough 2 events so far, both went great
our aim is to gather people from all the country (but we're absolutely open to foreign freedivers as well) who don't have the will to follow our italian federation requests (walking trough 5 categories before you can dive at you max, just as an example), formalities, etc nor want to move to a foreign country to take part at an aida event (no aida events here so far, unfortunately)

in few word, the concept is: team competitions, teams from 3 to 5 people each, all male teams compete among males of coures as well as mixed teams, while all female teams have separate ranking
team scores are calculated as the average of the singles athletes scores, thus making of no importance if you are 3 or 4 or 5 people
if someone blacks out or shows samba, the team score for that speciality is deleted, sending that team to the bottom of the speciality ranking and compromising the overall ranking of the event

i had some nice ideas to make this even more fun, such as making each team's athletes competing at the same time and some other situations, but we stayed on something plain for the beginning

for the depth competitions, in collaboration with Trygons but using our own money, we built this thing, called Lulù:

it is an amazing safety system with multiple recovery options, 150m rope, communication systems with scuba divers, depth camera on the plate and live view monitor
this thing has been presented in Lignano in october (Herbert was there) and was intended to be used in Salina a few weeks later but unfortunately the Salina event had to be canceled
we now have at least 4 or 5 events programmed for the next year and we'll be sure using it widely
as long as the Lignano event with Evolution Cup has been covered .not live, but it's nice anyway- by RAI television ( which is the italian national television) we expect to cover some other events this way
both the first event of our Trophy and the Evolution Cup have been entirely covered by web tv on evolutionchannel.com, where you can find the videos and download them

when i find a link to the english version of our rules (i know it exists: i wrote the italian version and made small changes on the english translation), i'll post it here, so you can have a better idea of what we're doing in italy

 

[DivingDane]

i think the key is to still have nominations but them to be silent nominations for safety purpose only. this way the audiance has no idea of how deep the dive will be until the turn! realtime depth graph on the image, comentation multi abgle footage.

no question we'd have peopke watching. the number of people in my travels i show the classic clips to is incredible and the ALL with out acception are speachless by the end.

- the Arch swimm
- Will's 88m video
- freefall

those kinds of things.
i think real wolrd competition on prime time would work really well. the key is to create a percieved risk and danger for the viewer but never for the athlete. with no idea how far the diver is going the viewer will be on the edge of their seat to see if the diver reaches the plate or makes it to the surface. i think its a winner. the key is to make sure the footage is spot on.

images from:
- above
- below
- side on following the dive
- face video: can see the struggle or the smile on the bottom.

no different to the red bull air race.

DD

 

[Will]

We just posted footage to my Facebook page from the Seaviewer remote-operated camera that we are using at maximum depth.
William Trubridge | Facebook

 

[CEngelbrecht]

Now we're talking. A little more of that, and Pelizzari as guest commentator on a Eurosport broadcast, then we're talking serious TV sports.