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In 2021, Thibault Guignes managed to rescue two deep freedivers from almost certain death. That had a highly traumatic effect on his psyche and performance. In E3 of the Alchemy Podcast, we asked him if he would do safety for a friend of his attempting a No Limits WR. Here’s what he replied.
I was a climber, but I was mostly a boulderer, I wasn't the one doing the extreme things. I had some friends doing such stuff and I lost a couple of friends who were doing alpinism & ice climbing, but I couldn't really relate to what they were experiencing and what they were doing. When it comes to freediving, I know how things can go wrong as I’ve experienced it myself or I was there when it happened as well. I even had an interesting talk with my coach who told me, "you know, Thibault, if you want to be a top athlete, stop doing safety for people, you're gonna traumatize yourself, you should have people doing safety for you".
But a big part of what makes me happy when I freedive is when I freedive with my friends. Even when it's about progressing and going deeper, what makes me strong is when I feel safe surrounded by my friends. And that's also why you create bonds very quickly with the safety divers at a competition. Sometimes you don't know them at all before the competition and you feel like really connected by the end of it, because you end up trusting them and feeling safe with them. And so, not doing safety anymore, at least for other top athletes or people going really deep, could be a good calculation so that I don't end up in a situation that will mess with my mind again.
But I feel also there is another path, learning to deal with it, which might be longer and that maybe I didn't master yet. I'm working on it, we’ll see. I really hope nothing happens for a long time after these two accidents. You know, after the first one I felt like, “okay, I did the rescue of my life, this will not happen anymore in my career”. Because when you teach in a freediving school, usually you teach people that don’t dive deep. But when training with other top athletes, you expose yourself more to something potentially happening. The deeper you go, the riskier it gets, even if you have a good approach. It's just statistics.
Say one of my closest friends got obsessed with doing a No Limits WR and asked me to do safety for him - I wouldn't do it. I would support him from outside, but I wouldn't be the one in the water with him. I could be there from the beginning of his journey and make sure to help him as much as I can, choosing the team to help him and stuff, but I wouldn't want to be in the water. I think it would be better for me not to be there. You also need to have people there with you during the attempt with confident vibes and stuff. If I'm there, calculating in my head everything that can happen, I’m not sure it's gonna bring the good vibes that the athlete needs. So no, I wouldn't expose myself to something as risky as No Limits.