It's Time: Showdown at Nice
Posted By Paul Kotik on 29 August 2005
Speaking of head games, Tom Sietas wasn’t fooling anybody with that tactical deception of his in the Static event. His gold medal 208m victory lap in Dynamic is where his head is at, and nobody knows it better than the Gang of Four, recently arrived in the South of France from North America.
The three gentlemen of the Performance Freediving team established a forward base of operations in serene St. Jean Cap-Ferrat on August 20, and having reported back to Headquarters that the training area had been put in order were joined by the team's de facto Commander-in-Chief on August 28.
Performance Freediving ( Mandy-Rae Cruickshank, Kirk Krack, Dr. George Lopez, and Martin Stepanek) has come to town to defend the world titles they’ve worked so hard and for so long to capture and retain.
Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown. Martin Stepanek’s Constant Weight title is arguably the most coveted in all of freediving. True, the past couple of years have seen a dizzying ramp-up of performance levels across the board, as brilliant new athletes find their way to our sport’s highest echelons. What was done at Renens was magnificent, more so, even, than the dry numbers suggest. Competitions are orchestrated unpredictability. The pool is cool, but Constant Weight still, somehow, is the thing. Stepanek has trained hard, and is as determined as ever to excel, but the day will come when Tom or Carlos or somebody we don’t even know yet will slip past him.
Maybe this time, maybe not. I don’t know what more Martin could have done to prepare for this defense of his crown, but then, there can be little doubt but that his challengers’ investment in victory has not been any less. Perhaps a bit less – sleeping in a hypoxic tent every night at a virtual altitude of 3,000 meters or more, as Martin has done in training for this event, is not for everyone.
Mandy-Rae Cruickshank is the guardian of Team Performance Freediving’s distaff domination. I well recall some of Mandy’s first ‘deep’ Constant Weight training dives, back in Honaunau Bay on the Big Island of Hawai’i in the winter of 2001. Although challenged (Mandy’s Canadian, after all) by Honaunau’s clear, warm water and the lack of the 5 -7 mil wetsuit she’d grown up with in Vancouver, she just kept dropping deeper and deeper. Forty meters seemed like a big deal at the time, but of course she’s more than doubled that depth since then. Mandy’s background in competitive swimming goes way back, and she’s a disciplined trouper with a rock –solid commitment to excellence.
But then, so are her challengers.
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