WBUR
Sept 27 2014
Forty Years Later, Soviet Athlete’s Life-Saving Heroics Remembered
September 27, 2014
Nearly 40 years ago, a European swimming champion was out for a run in
his home country of Armenia — then part of the U.S.S.R. — when a
trolleybus went off the tracks and plunged into a nearby lake.
Shavarsh Karapetyan dove into the lake and saved dozens of lives.
Carl Schreck chronicled that afternoon and its impact on Karapetyan’s
life — and swimming career — in a piece for Grantland. Schreck joined
Bill Littlefield on Only A Game.
BL: Before that day at the lake, the 23-year-old Karapetyan had won
eight European swimming titles and set some world records along the
way. So why was he running by himself in the Armenian capital that day
instead of training with the Soviet team?
Several of those people were dead by the time he got them up, but he
had no time and no possibility of figuring out who he was grabbing.
– Carl Schreck
CS: He had been dropped from the Soviet national team. He thinks it’s
because the Soviets wanted to feature some younger swimmers. He had
also suffered an illness earlier in the year but says he was fully
recovered. It’s unclear exactly why they dropped him from the team.
What is clear is that he was extremely peeved and went out on a
mission to train as hard as he could, which is why he was out running
by the lake that day.
BL: Well, take us through what happened that afternoon at Lake Yerevan
at the end of Karapetyan’s 13-mile run?
CS: He was on the home stretch, and he came up onto a bridge right
next to Lake Yerevan and all of a sudden he heard a commotion, looked
to his left and saw that a trolleybus had sailed over the embankment,
crashed into some cement at the base of the lake and rolled into the
water.
He immediately stripped off his clothes. He swam out to the trolleybus
— it was about 80 feet from shore — dove down to try to figure out if
there was an open window or an open door. The area under water was
just flooded with silt. It was just completely black. They couldn’t
see anything, and so Karapetyan decided that he had to kick in a
window. So he did what he described as a karate kick — bashed his leg
through the window; shredded his leg — and managed to jostle a window
loose and then just started reaching inside for anything that felt
human.
Finswimmers use flippers to help them swim below water. Karapetyan’s
training included breathing techniques that he needed to dive to the
sunken trolleybus over and over again. (Paolo Bruno/Getty Images)
BL: According to your article, Karapetyan’s training helped him a lot
in his rescue mission. But it wasn’t his classical swim training, was
it?
CS: His sport was finswimming, which is a niche sport. So his training
was specifically geared toward underwater swimming. And a lot of the
work he did was outside of the water: a lot of very serious power
training, a lot of running and also a lot of breathwork, specifically
to hyperventilate before entering the water, which essentially — the
hyperventilation makes you less likely to feel the urge to come up to
breathe. So he was an expert on this breathing technique, which he
utilized then when he dove into the water and proceeded to swim down
to the trolleybus.
BL: Karapetyan had been retrieving bodies for more than 20 minutes
when rescue workers told him to stop. They said, “Don’t kill yourself
for nothing.” How real was the warning?
WWI And The Tour De France
World War I left 45 former Tour De France riders dead. On the 100th
anniversary of the start of the war, we looked at how WWI changed the
future of European cycling.
CS: There were an estimated 90 passengers in the bus at the time. He
knew they had a limited window to survive down there, which added some
urgency to his mission. And so they determined after 20 minutes that
no one else could possibly be alive down there.
At that point he had hauled up, he and his brother estimate, about 30
to 35 people. Several of those people were dead by the time he got
them up, but he had no time and no possibility of figuring out who he
was grabbing from the bus.
BL: So, some number of people were saved by this guy. It must have
made Karapetyan a national hero.
CS: Well, you would think so given the act itself and the remarkable
coincidence that possibly the world’s greatest underwater swimmer — in
a country where a small percentage of the population can even swim —
happened to be running by. But in fact, the Soviets as a rule hushed
up any major accidents like this. The idea was that there’s no way a
Soviet trolleybus could fall into the water.
BL: So, if they hushed up the accident obviously they hushed up the heroic act.
CS: Exactly, exactly. Even the classified government report that came
out didn’t mention him at all.
BL: What happened next for Karapetyan? Did he ever get back to
competitive swimming?
Even the classified government report that came out didn’t mention him at all.
– Carl Schreck
CS: The rescue mission permanently damaged his lungs. He came down
with pneumonia in both lungs. His temperature spiked that evening and
his doctors say it’s a miracle that he even survived. His condition
was exacerbated by the fact that the reservoir was absolutely filthy
and just filled with the industrial runoff. So, he was in bed for
several weeks.
He managed to stand up a couple weeks later and he did manage to get
up and walk around and was back in the pool three months later. By the
time he got back to training he absolutely despised the water. He said
he wasn’t scared; he just hated it. But he pressed through. He’s an
incredibly competitive man. And he fought through it and within a year
had returned to the Soviet Championships and managed to set his 11th
and final world record.
BL: What is Karapetyan doing these days and how does he remember the
occurrences of that day?
CS: He runs businesses in Moscow. He’s lived in Moscow since the late
1980s. He’s told the story quite a bit. His story is pretty well known
in the former Soviet Union and … I get the impression he, in some
respects, is a little tired of talking about it. All his friends call
him a very modest man, which was my impression of him as well — so
modest, in fact, when he was courting his soon-to-be wife in the early
1980s, he didn’t even tell her about the incident. She only learned
about it when a Soviet reporter dug up the story six years after it
happened and it then made it into the official Soviet press.
http://onlyagame.wbur.org/2014/09/27/shavarsh-karapetyan-lake-yerevan