Earlier this year, Vitomir Maričić walked into a repurposed banquet room in the Bristol Hotel on Croatia’s Opatija coast. Beneath a gaudy three-tiered chandelier, a 3m-deep pool had been set up where tables and chairs usually stood. Close by, on a wooden table was a timer with large neon letters. Watched by five official judges and some 100 spectators, Maričić, the country’s best freediver, lowered himself into the pool, and the timer began.
Maričić’s aim was to stay on the bottom of the pool for 25 minutes, thereby breaking the 24min, 37sec breath holding record set by fellow-Croatian Budimir Šobat in 2021. When Maričić finally emerged, after 29min 3sec at the bottom of the pool, he had not only set a new Guinness World Record, he’d quite literally blown Šobat’s effort out of the water.
“It was horrible. At 10 minutes, I'm thinking, ‘This is so hard and there's 15 more to go,’” Maričić explains. “It was really, really hard and I was struggling all the way through. I thought of giving up many times, but then after 20 minutes, you have a feeling, ‘Okay, it's just five minutes more.’”
Maričić, 40, isn’t new to this. While not a household name, he’s been steadily amassing breath-holding records since dedicating himself to free diving in 2020. In 2021, he set the Guinness World Record for longest underwater walk on one breath at 107m. On July 11th, less than a month after his record-breaking breath hold, he set another world record, this time for the first 240kg squat at 10 meters depth in the world’s deepest swimming pool, the Y-40, located at the Hotel Terme Millepini in Italy.
Maričić first became immersed in the world of breath holding at the age of three when, learning to swim in the sea around Kvarner, Croatia, he realised that floating on his back in the waves was fine, but turning around and exploring beneath the waves was much more fun.
“From that day forward, most of my time in the water was under the surface, exploring the underwater world, and more importantly, myself,” he says. Even as a child, he was possessed by an incredible amount of self belief. “I knew I was good at it,” he explains. “I compared myself to my peers and the adults around me and realised I was already better than everyone I met.”
Buoyed by unsinkable certainty, he kept diving through elementary school until he was eventually beaten back by cold winter waters and the allure of drier, land-based sports like climbing, unicycling, or anything with a ball. Looking to explore the world beyond Croatia, after graduating Maričić set out, first on a tour of the world, studying everything from IT and photography to sport science along the way. In 2016 he found himself in New Zealand where he’d moved to focus on rock climbing.
“I really like Croatia, and I live here now because I think it's the best place in the world, but growing up I had a huge desire to see the world and experience all of these things and places I’d seen in movies,” he says. “One of my childhood aims was ‘Go to the end of the world,’” he explains. “For me, New Zealand was the obvious choice.”
After a year he ended up joining the New Zealand circus as a gymnast. It was only when an accident resulted in a torn bicep tendon three years later that Maričić decided to rededicate himself to diving. He headed back to Croatia, and jumped in.
“At the age of 35 I decided to let go again, and immerse into myself, to find peace, love, satisfaction and harmony,” he wrote at the time. “Freediving…will be a wondrous experience and a journey of a lifetime.”
Maričić’s physical metrics have been studied, revealing a natural aptitude for diving, which he credits along with a generally sporty background in allowing him to excel. Despite this, the path of a professional diver is not an easy one. But Maričić, who does not have children, has been able to sustain his career as a full time free diver by coaching and selling record attempts to high end hotel chains like the Bristol Hotel and Terme Millepini.
Maričić organises the events with the hotel, driving PR for both, and allowing him a spotlight to attempt records. He even has a “menu” of record options for the hotel to choose from. Naturally, he can never guarantee a record will be broken, although he usually feels confident.
“[Usually with record attempts] I’m very confident I can do it,” Maričić says. “This time, I really wasn't sure because I've never tried something like that.”
To the casual observer, holding your breath in what is essentially an inflatable pool in an empty hotel conference room seems slightly less glamorous than doing the same in the open ocean. It feels significantly less dangerous too; there are no sharks in hotel pools, and what could really go wrong at a depth of three metres? In actuality, Maričić says his recent world record was the most dangerous thing he’s ever done.
“Absolutely, the ocean is better,” he says. “You have the depth and everything is more natural. There was nothing natural about this record. It's something between a technical discipline and a free diving discipline. It's also the most risky event. [In the ocean] I can black out, but with this event, no one really knows how severe the blackouts could be due to CO2 intoxication.”
Maričić’s specific record in June was for “the longest breath held voluntarily under water using oxygen”, a category of diving which allows up to 30 minutes of breathing from an oxygen tank prior to submersion. With oxygen being pretty crucial to staying alive under water, a pre-dive top up offers obvious advantages. When Maričić began his dive, he had roughly five times more oxygen in his body than average.
Breathing oxygen before a dive encourages a process called denitrogenation, in which nitrogen in the lungs is replaced with oxygen, upping the amounts of available oxygen from 450ml to almost three litres, depending on the person and their lung capacity. It also blunts the CO2 response, making Maričić’s body less able to recognise when potentially toxic levels are building up.
(For context, the official Association Internationale pour le Développement de l'Apnée (AIDA) world record for breath holding without oxygen was set by Serbian Branko Petrović at 11min 54sec. Maričić’s record iss 10min 8sec, while a bottlenose dolphin can hold its breath for up to 10 minutes).
Maričić’s recent record might have been torturous, but it wasn’t anything he hadn’t prepared for. Staying strong under water comes down to being well-informed about what to expect from your body so nothing takes you by surprise, being in top shape physically, and using mental tools like visualisation, or Maričić’s preferred method of defocusing and simply being present rather than thinking big picture.
“The mental part is really important in free diving,” he says. “I think I have a natural or emotional detachment.”
He didn’t get away scott-free. Maričić describes passing blood following his world record and when we speak in late August he says that after a six month period of global record attempts alongside coaching other athletes in their own record attempts his body still does not feel back to normal.
“It’s been extremely intensive,” he says. “This neurological dis-balance that I felt after my record feels like a cumulative effect.”
Now comes a time of rest and recovery, although Maričić does have new projects in mind, not all of them necessarily in free diving. “I would like to do records in other sports, like climbing, but I'm just not good enough,” he admits. “Free diving is a very new, small sport, and I'm kind of talented, so I can't get away with new records or stunt records, but more talented people are coming in and I'm sure all the records will be broken very soon.”
With the future of the sport no longer resting on his shoulders, Maričić will surely find relief in finally being able to come up for air.
