H2O team

Dear freediving friends,

Martin Stepanek of the Czech Republic recently achieved a performance of 83 meters in Constant Weight No Fins (CNF) during his world record event in Dahab, Egypt. The record dive was judged to be valid by the judges on site. The AIDA board was asked to review the dive. Upon review of the events connected to the dive the AIDA Board has made the following comments and conclusions.

Martin’s record dive is valid. He is the new world record holder. The regulations call for on site judgment being made for world records by the judges at the site. In addition, if an error is made in that judgment, the benefit of the doubt goes to the athlete when an error is not related to the validity of the athlete’s performance. In this case, the judges on site judged the performance as valid. Martin’s performance was not flawed; he made the depth and returned. It is the board’s decision to respect the on site judgment of the judges and give the benefit of the doubt to the athlete.

Protests are available for world records even after a decision has been made by the on site judges, just as they are available during a competition. The AIDA Board functions in this role for world records. If a protest of the Board’s decision is desired, that protest should be addressed to the AIDA Disciplinary Committee at the following E-mail address. Discipline_AIDA @ yahoogroups.com This option still remains in this case.

This decision was not an easy decision. The AIDA Board will make changes in an attempt to never have a situation such as this occur again. The Board will be working on documents to attempt to eliminate any mixed messages between documents that exist currently.

The issues in this case should in no way be thought to reflect poorly on the validity of Martin’s performance or his record.

All non-sled depth disciplines require the use of a tag. Both world record and competition performances require the athlete to recover a tag. This regulation remains in place and will continue to be respected.


AIDA Executive Board
2007-08-13

pehtran je napisal:Sandi, jaz pa ne vem, zakaj si moral omeniti kranjsko tekmo v zvezi z Martinovim rekordom? Te napetosti med klubi in tekmovalci so meni osebno čisto mimo. Ne da se mi s tem ukvarjat, mi pa gre na živce, če se stalno priliva olje na ogenj. Če se bomo čisto pri vsaki temi vračali na stare zamere, ne bo nikoli mir, pa tudi tekem po mojem ne bo.
Miha

Martin’s record dive in CNF

Martin Stepanek’s recent Constant No Fins World Record dive of 83 meters has been declared non valid by the AIDA board. The board in this decision faced various issues. Each world record is officiated over by two AIDA judges. These judges are tasked with the obligation to protect three people during each performance; the current record holder, the athlete attempting to break the record, and the future record holder that will have to break a more difficult record. Due to the lack of a tag during this record attempt, the AIDA board has decided that the regulations were not fulfilled during the record performance. Thus, the board has been forced to take action on this matter.

AIDA Executive Board
2007-09-27

AIDA Board would like to inform you ALL of our recent and final decision regarding Mr. Štìpánek record in CNF. As you all know there has been a great deal of controversy related to this record. On first review the decision was to uphold Mr. Štìpánek record at 83 meters. Upon further review by the Disciplinary Committee and an additional vote by the board, it has been decided to reject Mr. Štìpánek 83-meter CNF record. The lack of a tag and the failure of the judges to enforce this regulation have caused the board to decide that Mr. Štìpánek record is not valid.

This decision was not easy for the board to make. And AIDA would like to apologize to Martin, his organizer and his sponsors for this really bad situation. The judges that represented AIDA at the dive have received appropriate disciplinary measures.

Bill Strömberg
AIDA President

Dear Fellow Freedivers:

The AIDA validation process for my recent -83 meters CNF attempt has given rise to numerous disputes and various complaints, and has created lot of controversy. I'd like to take this opportunity to respond to your many messages and inquiries, and to make my personal view of this situation known to the freediving community.

I've not felt the need to intervene personally in the AIDA validation process, or in the public controversy which now surrounds it, even though a World Record hung in the balance. I see the controversy that arose with regard to the validity of my dive as an AIDA World Record as a dispute between AIDA and William Truebridge, whose CNF World Record would be displaced by my performance were it validated.

I did what I was instructed to do by the AIDA officials on the scene: I executed the dive without a tag and without a lanyard. It was the deepest CNF dive ever performed. No one disputes that. The AIDA Executive Board has, finally, on September 27 ruled that this dive did not comply with AIDA regulations and was, therefore, not a valid World Record dive.

I well understand that rules are here to level the field for everybody, so the competition is fair. I am not interested or inclined to cry, beg or protest to get my record back. To me, on a personal level, it doesn’t much matter whether I see the ‘WR’ mark beside my depth number. I know how deep I can dive, AIDA knows, and I think my competitors have a pretty good idea, too.

What concerns me more is the way this matter was handled, and what the consequences will be for competitive freediving in the future.

What has emerged from this episode is distressing. We see now that an athlete seeking recognition of his or her performance as an AIDA World Record must comply with no fewer than three sets of contradictory regulations, which not even the highest-ranking AIDA officials are able to reconcile and make sense of! AIDA, the pre-eminent and most widely-recognized sanctioning body for freediving - the only one with global reach - has shown itself to be unreliable and inconsistent, when the main reason for being of a sanctioning body is to assure reliability and consistency.

The immediate and developing consequences of this disclosure are grim. Sponsors are running for the hills, since they cannot rely upon a timely and final decision regarding the validity of a record they pay for. Athletes will increasingly see AIDA as irrelevant, and too risky to get involved with.

I am not going to follow examples of Umberto Pelizzari, Stephan Mifsud or Patrick Musimu, who were driven away from AIDA by circumstances similar to those we now find ourselves facing up to. Not at this point. I believe that there is still hope for AIDA, and that the obvious and necessary changes can be put in place quickly. The silver lining here is that the flaws have been exposed and are not controversial. All that's required here is good will and professionalism. Professionalism is a personal virtue which can be and should be implanted in organizations by the individuals who manage them.

I am not going to demand that William Truebridge's CNF AIDA World Record be revoked by application of the same rule invoked to invalidate mine: William performed his dive, all agree, without what we now are told is the required lanyard.

I understand the challenges faced by the AIDA Judges in Dahab during my event there. Rough weather made it impossible for me to do the -112m Constant Weight dive I'd planned, and so we improvised a CNF dive which I had not trained for, and for which the Judges had quite reasonably not prepared themselves to supervise and validate. The Judges, and AIDA itself have acknowledged the errors they committed prior to, during and after my -83 CNF dive. No one has suggested that the dive itself was not entirely successful.

I hope and trust that we, as a community, will go forward from this unfortunate circumstance wiser and better able to promote and preserve the sport we all love.