Nico (@E0_DS0_Omega) “he held world records, the fastest finswimmer alive, and the day it counted he s” — TopicDigg

he held world records, the fastest finswimmer alive, and the day it counted he swam the wrong direction. down into a sunken bus, in cold sewage he could not see through, pulling strangers up one at a time until the lake took the lungs that made him a champion… september 16, 1976. a trolleybus carrying around ninety-two people went off a dam near yerevan and dropped into the reservoir, sinking about ten meters down, twenty-five meters from shore. shavarsh karapetyan had just finished a 20 km training run with his brother when he watched it go under. he swam out, went down, and kicked the rear window in with his feet. the water was near black. he worked by touch, diving to the bottom again and again, bringing one body up each trip and handing it to the boat. he pulled up close to forty-six people. twenty of them lived. the reservoir was fouled with sewage. the glass cuts and the filthy water in his chest turned into blood poisoning and pneumonia, and he spent about forty-five days in a hospital bed. when he came out the lungs that had made him the fastest swimmer on earth were scarred for good. he was twenty-three, and his career was finished. here is the part that stayed underwater longer than any of them. for about six years the state said almost nothing. no headline, no ceremony worth the name. only in 1982 did a newspaper finally print what happened at the lake, and then the mail came, tens of thousands of letters from people who had never been told. there is a minor planet out past mars now, 3027 shavarsh, named for a man his own country could not be bothered to mention for six years. in 1985 he passed a burning sports complex in yerevan and went in again, and came out burned. twenty people walked off that shore alive. the man who put them there lost the lungs that made him the fastest swimmer on earth, and waited six years for anyone to say it out loud.