The Man Who Held His Breath for 24 Minutes

Budimir Šobat had been lying face down in a swimming pool for around a quarter of an hour on March 27, 2021, when something strange happened: he fell asleep.

Šobat, a 56-year-old professional freediver from Zagreb, Croatia, was aiming to break the world record for the longest breath ever held. He guessed he was approaching 17 minutes—roughly the point at which the body’s third, final, and most painful stage of oxygen deprivation began, when carbon dioxide would fill the body and the diaphragm would spasm violently, like a thunder sheet.

This approaching wall of agony might understandably have stressed out Šobat. But he had spent six years training his mind for this exact moment, developing the ability to enter a quasi-sleep state to conserve as much energy-sapping thought as possible.

Šobat wasn’t supposed to relax enough to actually drift off, though. Moments later, a bubble floated from his now-open mouth and brushed his eye, jogging him awake.

This isn’t good, he thought. For 30 minutes before the attempt, Šobat had filled his lungs with bottled pure oxygen. That meant he could go 20 or more minutes on a single breath, a near-magical feat. But it also raised the danger of blacking out, which could set off a deadly chemical chain reaction, toxifying the oxygen and destroying blood vessels, his lungs, or even his brain.

Šobat slammed his mouth shut. He assumed the worst. He saw his life flash by in a heartbeat.

Then he opened his eyes. He wasn’t dead. But he hadn’t dreamed the experience, either. He’d slept, and now he was stressed. Stress meant an increased heart rate, and a high heart rate meant certain failure.

Šobat repeated a silent mantra: don’t panic, don’t panic, it’s OK, it’s OK. His heart rate fell, and he felt the pre-agreed-upon tap of his coach’s finger on his back: 17 minutes. Fuck, he thought. I’m still here. It’s not a blackout.

Moments later, the spasms began. Šobat closed his eyes. It was time to suffer.

When Šobat finally did lift his head out of the water, he’d held his breath for 24 minutes and 37 seconds. He pinched his right thumb and forefinger together. “I’m OK,” he said. A small crowd gathered near the pool edge clapped and cheered, and Šobat smiled. He hadn’t just broken the record. He’d crushed it—by over half a minute.

Others might have celebrated with a victory lap, a glass of wine, or the afternoon off. Not Šobat. He changed, packed his gear, and met his wife and daughter in the parking lot. They didn’t mention the record once. And besides, it was his turn to clean the bathroom.

Throughout his 60 years, Budimir Šobat has been many things—a soldier, athlete, model, stuntman, bouncer—but he has always been an addict. At first it was basketball, and he won a Yugoslavian scholarship to play the game. Then he got into bodybuilding and became a national champion in the newly formed Croatia. Booze took over, and for a while, Šobat couldn’t face the day without a swig of Johnnie Walker. Then, in 2000, his daughter was born, and his life found a new focus. She had brain damage, and doctors questioned whether she would ever be able to walk or talk. So he and his wife, Sandra, ditched their previous lives and poured everything into her.

In 2011, when he was 46, Šobat found a new addiction when a friend introduced him to freediving, the practice of remaining underwater on a single breath. He was good—especially at holding his breath, the sport’s foundational skill. Soon, he was winning tournaments and experimenting with pure oxygen. A team of international scientists discovered in him a genetic predisposition to the sport so rare that a pharmaceutical firm invited him to Canada to examine it. But greatness required mastery not only of the body but the mind too, an ability to silence what freediving legend William Trubridge calls “the chattering monkey that lives in my head.”

It took years for Šobat to realize: he’d been given a gift for that, too. And she’d been staring him in the face for almost 20 years.

On an unseasonably warm morning in January, sunlight pours through the glass facade of the Utrina Baths, an Olympic-size swimming pool on the outskirts of Zagreb, Croatia. Speedo-clad pensioners occupy most lanes, scrolling gently back and forth and gathering to gossip on pool-side bleachers. Somewhere beyond the changing rooms, a teacher warns kids to stop running. Tinny chart tunes drift across the arena.

In two lanes at the far end of the pool are the freedivers. Tall and muscular and decked in gray-black wetsuits, they look comically out of place, like superheroes at a bake sale. But they’re deadly serious. National trials are approaching and, beyond them, the world championships.

Šobat emerges after swimming 200 meters underwater and hauls himself onto the edge of the pool. He sits in silence for a couple minutes. Then he removes his scuba fins and nose clip, stands, and peels off the top half of his suit. He is six-foot-four-inches tall, with the lean, tan frame of a man half his 59 years. Only his hair, a silver, Sideshow Bob-esque mop that falls over his puckered face, betrays the fact that he’s closer in age to the elderly swimmers than his freediving cohort. Not that aesthetics bother him greatly, as he turns and heads for the shower, smiling wryly.

“Our beautiful sport,” he jokes.

Google “freediving” and you will encounter a multitude of slick, Instagrammable archetypes: Freediver Swimming with Shoals of Fish; Freediver Observing Shipwreck; Freediver Meditating on Beach, and (the classic) Freediver Thrusting an Arm Upward through the Ocean Toward a Sliver of Sunlight. Since Luc Besson’s 1988 French classic movie Le Grand Bleu, which dramatized the rivalry between two champion freedivers, the sport’s promoters and the media have pruned an image of freediving as a tango between beauty and death, whose stars are possessed with an innate, Poseidon-like geist for water.

Russian freediving world champion Alexey Molchanov, who has set 34 freediving records, says it was this that drew him into the depths. “It wasn’t just a sport, the way it was presented,” he told GQ in 2021. “It was already this whole lifestyle. Of travels and adventures.”

Trubridge, whose Bahamas-based Vertical Blue is one of the sport’s premier events, writes in his biography: “It’s every freediver’s dream to swim with dolphins across an open seascape, tumbling and cavorting in three dimensions.”

There isn’t much room in this palette for public pools or paunchy, suburban retirees. Perhaps there should be.

“Freediving is just a sport like any other,” Šobat says. “There is no mystique in it…’I’m floating with dolphins and I’m turning around and—’ blah, blah, blah … Don’t bullshit me. It’s just a show for the public.

“You go to the water, you hold your breath, you finish, and you go home,” he says, typically matter-of-fact. “If you find something good in it, good. If not, also good.”

This flippancy may have more than a little to do with the freediving community’s attitude toward Šobat’s breath-holding achievements. Competitive freediving events demand that participants inhale nothing but normal air prior to a dive. Šobat, however, belongs to a small cadre of so-called “apneists”—those who specialize solely in breath-holding—who supercharge their times by first breathing 100-percent pure oxygen.

Freedivers often believe this to be a form of doping, like taking beta blockers and other medication. Some have written off Šobat, and those competing for his “pure-oxygen static apnea” record, as “magicians.” And to be fair to them, the man who first popularized the record was the illusionist David Blaine, who held his breath for 17 minutes and 4 seconds on a 2008 episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show. Trubridge, a champion in constant-weight-no-fins (CNF) freediving, widely considered the sport’s noblest discipline, told me that pure-oxygen static apnea is “somewhere on the spectrum” with more gimmicky breath-holding records, such as the Longest Underwater Kiss (four minutes, six seconds) or the Farthest Distance Cycling Underwater (22,007 feet, 9.96 inches). “It’s not a pure discipline,” Trubridge said.

Šobat does not see his technique as doping, but he understands the criticism. “It’s Guinness,” he says. “It’s a circus.” His longest breath hold without huffing O₂ is, unofficially, 10:17, which would place him fourth behind Serbian diver Branko Petrovic’s current world record of 11:54. And he admits he’d rather clock a freedive deeper than 130 meters, which he hasn’t yet done.

But peer respect wasn’t why Šobat broke the record. And the scorn for Freediving Culture™ probably has more to do with his upbringing, which involved very few dolphins and a lot of guns. Šobat was born in Zagreb in 1965, when Croatia was part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and his academic mother, born in Croatia, and Serbia-born military general father were card-carrying members of the Communist Party. Šobat was unlike either of them. He was a talented basketball player but a bad student. He struggled in class, drank alcohol, and stole. When Šobat missed out on a place at Yugoslavia’s national basketball camp because of bad grades, at age 16, he took his father’s military-issue pistol and turned the barrel on himself, but it jammed.

At age 18, Šobat joined the Yugoslav special forces and spent a year undergoing grueling hikes and training exercises. Then he enrolled in law school, but dropped out in his third year. Šobat was a keen point guard, and he competed in Yugoslavia’s second basketball division. His military training instilled an almost maniacal pursuit of fitness, and for three years he moonlit as a stuntman, at one point doubling for American actor Christopher Reeve when the star shot 1985 movie The Aviator in Croatia.

But in 1991, as the Iron Curtain crumbled, Yugoslavia’s six constituent states—Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Slovenia, Macedonia, and Montenegro—tumbled toward war. The ensuing civil conflict transformed neighbors and even family members into enemies. People crouched on their stoops behind sandbags, and trained rifles on folks they’d played soccer or shopped with just days previous. Šobat didn’t much feel like killing his dad’s family on behalf of his mom’s. Instead, he scrabbled together some Deutschmarks and bought a ticket on the next flight out of Zagreb. It was headed for London. Buda’s best friend had vowed to join him, but backed out at the last minute. He was killed on his first day of battlefield action in Bosnia.

Šobat scored a job at a grocery store in London’s glamorous Little Venice neighborhood, and spent almost every penny of his salary on rent and booze—Johnnie Walker Black Label if he had cash; Red if not. He smoked two packs of cigarettes a day. Šobat looked like a vacuum-packed Adrien Brody, with long, black hair and abs like cinder blocks, and a girlfriend bagged him a brief gig as a catalog model. But when he browsed his agency’s portfolio—full of towering, classically handsome stablemates—he gave up.

Šobat returned to Zagreb in 1995. But he had lost friends and family to the war, and his father was a broken man: Yugoslavia, the project to which he’d dedicated his life, had cascaded into chaos and genocide. Threatening letters and bullets arrived in the mail, and he started to drink heavily. “And I realized,” says Šobat, “I’m losing him.”

Soon afterward, a parachuting accident left Šobat with extensive back injuries that ended his dream to play top-level basketball. To maintain his fitness obsession, he turned to bodybuilding. It was strict, and measurable, and he loved it.

“You have to wake up at the same time, you have to eat this, you have to work on that,” he says. “You have to go to sleep, you have to put on paper: Did you eat well, did you not?” Šobat quickly climbed the ranks in Croatia. He worked out so hard one time that he broke his shoulder. The pain didn’t faze him. But parading around half-naked at competitions felt demeaning. So he stuck to the gym.

Šobat’s mother had a second home on the Adriatic Coast, near her hometown of Dubrovnik, and he loved being in the water. He landed a job running a couple of nightclubs nearby and put in occasional shifts on the door. In 1996, at 31, Šobat met a Zagreb woman two years his junior named Aleksandra, “Sandra” for short, through a mutual friend. They partied, fell in love, and, in 1998, married. But Šobat’s drinking was getting out of control. Every night he drank, oftentimes alone in one of his bar’s back rooms. “I had a huge problem with alcohol,” he says. “I couldn’t count the money in the morning without being drunk. My hands were shaking.”

A year later, Sandra got pregnant. But things weren’t easy. She spent the second half of the pregnancy in the hospital, and at seven months, doctors discovered bleeding in the baby’s brain. They gave Sandra drugs to hold off a premature birth, but the baby girl, whom they named Saša, still spent the first five days of her life in an incubator, then another nine days in the NICU. It’s not good, doctors said. Her brain is damaged. The brief joy of fatherhood was buried in fear. “We knew everything was wrong,” he says.

The first diagnosis was cerebral palsy, a condition medics warned could confine Saša to bed or a wheelchair for her entire life. Her motor skills—the movement of her muscles—were underdeveloped, and she could move only involuntarily. (She would later be diagnosed with autism as well as epilepsy.) A specialist told the couple their daughter would need round-the-clock care forever. She might stand a slim chance of walking, he added—but only if they trained her muscles, via an intense program of stretching and occupational therapy, five times a day, for five to seven hours.

The news stunned Šobat. “How does anyone do that?” he asked.

“It’s simple,” the therapist replied. “She eats, she sleeps, she practices.”

Sandra and Šobat left the therapist’s office and burst into tears. Šobat knew how to train hard. But five hours a day, for years, with no guarantee that Saša would walk? There would barely be room for work, let alone a social life. They smoked half a pack of cigarettes in the parking lot. They understood, right there and then: life, as they had known it before, was over.

Šobat rationalized it as he’d done with basketball, bodybuilding, or the special forces. This is a project, he told himself. I won’t give up until it’s done. The first thing to go was the drink. Šobat knew he wasn’t the kind of guy who could enjoy one glass of wine—it was all or nothing. So he chose nothing.

“I forgot about parties, I forgot about everything,” he says. At first, he saw Saša as a project, too. “I said, ‘I love you, Saša,’ 2,000 times in the first two or three days,” he says. “But I didn’t feel it.” Sometimes he’d go for a coffee or a cigarette and forget everything, just for a moment. And then he’d remember, Oh, I have to work.

It was grueling, heartbreaking work. Stretching Saša’s fingers took 45 minutes alone, but that was easy. The tough part was relaxing the muscles in her tiny neck, which meant pinning Saša on the ground and rotating her shoulders around her head. It hurt the little girl, and she bucked and screamed, and Sandra wailed at Šobat: “Please let her go, please.” But he had to keep going, to keep hurting Saša, or she’d need an operation. So he did, for a whole month. “It’s traumatic,” he says. “Really traumatic.”

The couple spent every moment they weren’t working training Saša, and every cent on doctors who visited five times a week. They lived more like roommates than spouses: when one practiced, the other slept, and vice versa. All parents mourn their pre-kid lives in some way, watching the wild nights and lazy days grow smaller in the rear-view mirror. For the Šobats, that life fell clean off the face of the earth. Sandra would go days in the same pajamas, not brushing her teeth, not washing her hair. “I was so, so worried,” she says. “I was a complete mess … a little bit savage.”

But the thought of giving up never crossed her mind.

Saša “changed everything,” she adds. “She became the purpose.”

Pretty soon, Šobat didn’t have to say “I love you” over and over. The feeling was there, and it stuck. Two-and-a-half years later, Saša took her first step. But she still couldn’t speak. Shortly after, she was diagnosed with autism, too.

“Imagine yourself on Mount Everest, and it’s morning, and you wake up,” says Šobat, describing the condition. “There isn’t enough air to breathe, so you’re fighting with that. And there is a guy next to you, and he’s talking some language you don’t understand—Nepali, Chinese, whatever. Next morning, it’s a French guy.” This was Saša’s world: confusing and exhausting. And because autism isn’t homogeneous—each experience of it is unique—a parent can never fully understand the world their own child inhabits by observing others. There is only one road, and it is a slow one.

“I’m not talented, I’m just stubborn. I don’t want to give up. You can be better than I am, but you’ll never beat me.”

Doctors taught the Šobats to communicate with Saša through pictures. They would hold up images of animals, then ask her, “Which one is the cat?” It could take five, even ten minutes for Saša to point or nod her head. It was excruciating. “Saša,” Šobat would cry, “you know what a cat is!” But each new sentence, each fragment of information, made it worse, because Saša hadn’t processed the original question. And too much information could tip her into a traumatic meltdown.

There were long periods when he felt weak, says Šobat—when everything felt unfair, when he wanted to run away. I didn’t expect a life like this, he thought to himself.

I can’t handle it.
It’s too much for me.
I’m fucking angry.

But, over and over, love propelled him onward. Šobat came to think of Saša’s mind as a messy, windowless room, filled with dirt. He could help her sweep up the dirt; keep it in a neat pile. But it would always be there. “It doesn’t go away,” he says. “Sometimes you have to clean it again.”

The ocean helped. Multiple studies have shown that children with autism are especially drawn to water: it is not only visually stimulating, but it’s also a sensory escape from the sights, sounds, and smells of an overwhelming world above the surface. Saša loved it when the family visited the Adriatic, and Šobat loved being there with her.

In 2012, when Šobat was 46, a friend introduced him to the concept of freediving. He told Šobat to dive five meters to the seabed and come back, which he did with ease. Then he did seven—still easy. Over and over he dove, for around ten days, until he realized: I’m enjoying this. Freediving was simple and quantifiable, like bodybuilding. And the further he slid into the darkness, the more he felt enveloped by a profound sense of peace.

Šobat needed to go deeper. He’d found his new addiction.

For millennia, breath has been understood not only as the cornerstone of human life but as a path to spiritual enlightenment. Tibetan Buddhists believe in combining breath work with visualization and muscle contractions as a form of meditation, while pranayama, first mentioned in Sanskrit literature around 700 B.C., is meant to influence energy in the body through controlled breathing.

Modern gurus brought these philosophies back into the fold. Dutch extreme athlete Wim Hof has produced entire books and an app to encourage a program of guided breathing to help with stress, sleep quality, and other health issues. The 4-7-8 breathing method, devised by celebrity doctor Andrew Weil from ancient yogic practice, is peddled by everyone from Gwyneth Paltrow to ex-military tough-guy influencers.

But until the early nineties, breath-holding wasn’t a sport but a means to a living. The Bajau people of Southeast Asia have evolved for freediving: they possess enlarged spleens that provide more oxygenated blood, as do Korea’s Haenyeo women, who harvest mollusks and seaweed. It was only after Le Grand Bleu, and the 1992 formation of the Association Internationale pour le Développement de l’Apnée, the governing body of competitive breath-holding events, that people began to think of breath-holding as a sport. “Static apnea is the basic skill of freediving,” says Aleix Segura Vendrell, a Spaniard who held the record before Šobat, in an interview on the website Underwater360. “Breath holding is to freediving what running is to athletics.”

You need to be fit to hold your breath for the kinds of mind-bending times that place in the record books, of course; lung capacity is an obvious metric. But just as important—if not more so—is an ability to control the mind. In short, the brain requires oxygen to make energy. To hold your breath for extended periods, you need to maximize your oxygen intake and minimize its use. The brain accounts for two percent of body weight but consumes 20 percent of the body’s oxygen. Put simply, says Trubridge, “The more you think, the more you’re consuming oxygen.”

Key to this is to engage the parasympathetic nervous system and put the body into a “business-as-usual” mode that keeps basic functions going, including your resting heart rate. How to unlock this chemical calm varies from freediver to freediver. “It could come from meditation,” says Trubridge. “It could come from a past in yoga.”

Natalia Molchanova, one of the greatest-ever freedivers (and Alexey Molchanov’s mother), developed a technique called Attention Deconcentration, a kind of body scan. Croatian Goran Çorlak, who has held his breath for 23 minutes, visualizes a black dot on a white wall. “I don’t actively pursue any thoughts,” he says. “I just stare at the blank wall.”

When Šobat got serious about freediving, he had a bodybuilder’s physique: ripped, at five percent body fat, and weighing 275 pounds. “I was looking silly in the eyes of the other freedivers because they’re so slim,” he says. Zagreb was nearly a hundred miles from the ocean, so he practiced in Utrina. He cut weight and focused on static freediving, a discipline where athletes hold their breath while remaining still at the water’s surface, rather than swimming lengths of a pool or diving down into the ocean.

Five minutes.

Six minutes.

Two years in, Šobat was close to Croatian national times.

Seven minutes.

Incredibly, he was still smoking 40 cigarettes a day, oftentimes on the walk between his car and the pool. The smoke may have handed him a counterintuitive beginner’s advantage, having acclimatized his lungs to 25 years of CO₂ poisoning. But to improve, his coach told him he’d have to quit. So just as he had done with booze, he did—overnight. At first, his times plummeted. But a few months later, they began to climb back up.

He hit national squad times—and they improved. Šobat slimmed way down and trained five days a week at Utrina. But he didn’t have a coherent plan to calm his mind. Static isn’t like other forms of freediving. You’re not working at depth: you have only to lift your head an inch, and the pain is over. You’re not fighting the water; you’re fighting yourself.

First, Šobat tried to calm himself actively, to think himself into sleep mode. But it didn’t work. His mind would always wander to Saša—whether they had the money to pay for her therapy, what they’d buy her, or when they could take her to the sea—and it jolted his heart rate. Then he tried thinking about sex. Same problem.

Yoga was a nonstarter. Nothing seemed to work. And then it hit him. He’d been getting himself into that state for over a decade with Saša. Waiting for her to acknowledge a question, craving a conversation with her, or a hug; for her to live in his world, for once. It was love, but it was suffering, too. In those moments with Saša, Šobat says, “I’m completely out of my body. I’m looking at myself from outside.”

He transferred the feeling to the pool. The effect was almost instantaneous, like turning a key in a lock.

Eight minutes.

In 2018, he placed third in the Static division at the Apnea Indoor World Championship in Lignano Sabbiadoro, Italy, with a time of 8:17. He was 52 years old. He’d felt at ease until the final 30 seconds. “Saša gave me that patience,” he says. “Because it’s painful to sit in front of her and wait five or ten minutes. Saša gave those things to me, and I transferred them into my freediving.”

That same year, scientists from Croatia, Canada, and the United States gathered 16 local freedivers in Split, Croatia, to learn about apnea under varying conditions, including the use of huffed pure oxygen. For 15 of the divers, oxygen consumption in the brain decreased in the final minute of their breath-hold. But Šobat was different. After 18 minutes underwater, he heard somebody say they thought he’d had a seizure.

But he knew what seizures looked like: Saša suffered them semi-regularly, and they were the most horrific thing the family had to endure. What had actually happened was that Šobat’s brain had increased its oxygen intake, helping him combat rising levels of CO₂ and stay in the water for longer. When he lifted his head, Šobat had held his breath for 21 minutes and one second. The experts were stunned.

The Guinness World Record for pure-oxygen static was 24:03, held by Aleix Segura Vendrell. Šobat had topped nine minutes in regular apnea, and hoped to rank highly in other freediving disciplines. But taking the world’s longest breath could bring attention not just to him but Saša and others like her.

Guinness gave the greenlight for the attempt, and on February 24, 2018, Šobat spent 30 minutes taking pure oxygen from a tank—forcing extra gas into his lungs—before dipping below the surface at a Zagreb pool as part of a campaign called “I’m Not Breathing,” which raised money for Saša’s local autism center. He played music through earplugs—the Rolling Stones, Tchaikovsky—at minimum volume. Then he centered himself. When he could hear the music, he could hear his own heartbeat, and he was ready to suffer. When he resurfaced, the time on the digital clock beside him read 24:11. He’d broken Segura Vendrell’s record, but it was considered unofficial due to a recording mishap.

Scientists wanted Buda to attempt a 30-minute breath hold in Canada, but his commitments to Saša, and ultimately the COVID pandemic, put paid to that, and it hasn’t been revived since. In 2021, in Sisak, he set the record again. He still wants to go deeper in regular freedives, but pure oxygen is something different. “I don’t know how to explain,” he says. “You can feel the whole of your body, but you can’t move … You are kind of in space.”

Freediving is Šobat’s job now, and he works training athletes in Zagreb. He has three coaches and proselytizes freediving in Zagreb and across Croatia. Šobat has no doubt he can pass 30 minutes. But he’d rather create more awareness for Saša’s conditions by adding 20, 30, or 40 seconds each time, like an Olympic high-jumper.

“He’s one of those people, when they die, there’s going to be a thousand people at their funeral,” says Dragan Biskic, one of Šobat’s protégés. “He’s touched so many lives, and he’s so generous. When he’s doing something with you, when he’s coaching you … you really see that he’s passionate about you succeeding.”

Šobat still works out like a madman; he’s still addicted to the suffering. His lung capacity is at around eight liters (the average is six). His latest craze is static rowing; he’s competing on a national level. He obsesses over the concept of the perfect stroke. Sometimes he even rows while holding his breath. After this, his heart rate has reached 202 beats per minute.

“Buda is the most motivated athlete I have ever met in my life,” says Ivan Drviš, a Croatian coach and academic. “The challenge is not getting Buda to train; it’s the opposite … Because Buda still shows no signs of stopping, this will, in a way, become an experiment—testing how long a 60-year-old athlete can remain competitive against young athletes in peak sports condition.”

For Šobat, it’s just a job. “I’m not talented,” he says. “I’m just stubborn. I don’t want to give up. You can be better than I am, but you’ll never beat me. You remember Terminator 2, the guy who was chasing? I’m like him.”

But he’s not the T-1000, he’s a father—and his prime motivation is Saša. He doesn’t think she’ll ever know he’s a world record holder. She still has seizures, and she can’t go to sleep at night without first watching Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs on DVD. Her parents know every line.

Šobat never had a close relationship with his folks, and they’ve never discussed freediving. One day, not long after he took up the sport, his father called him on the phone. He’d never stopped drinking. “Come for a smoke,” he said. So they met. “Can you go it alone from now on?” he asked Šobat.

“I realized he was saying goodbye,” he says. Three days later, Šobat’s father died from a stroke. Šobat didn’t cry, and he’s never visited the grave. “There is no life after death,” he says. “You are not in a better place. You are just a piece of dust.”

That’s the worldview. Suffering. Pain. Death. Hold your breath. Take the pain. Get the record. The legacy is Saša’s. It’s almost a kind of guilt. “We taught her to live in our world,” says Šobat. “The experts are saying it’s much better in their world. They see colors different, they see movements different, and maybe they also hear different, and it’s maybe cruel to teach them to live here.”

But he and Sandra won’t live forever, he adds. So, unless anything in the science of autism changes dramatically, “I guess this is the world, unfortunately. It could be possible that there’s a place like the moon, like Neptune—some satellite where they’re living happily.

“It would break my heart, but I’d put her there,” he says. “But there is no such place.”

Šobat turned 60 years old in February. He is twice the age of most people with whom he competes. He recently guested on a Croatian podcast, and commentators mocked his age on social media. The idea that he might be running out of time and energy scared him. “I feel like I’m young, but I’m not,” he says. “I look like an old man.” He knows he doesn’t have forever. “You can’t fool nature,” he says. “I’m scared of it. I don’t know what I’m going to do if I can’t compete.” Play golf? He laughs.

“If everything’s OK with Saša, I will be OK,” he says. To die? “I’m not trying to say I want to kill myself,” he adds. “But I’m aware it will come. And if it comes, I’m ready.

“If it happens, let’s do it in the sea.”

Editor’s Note: On June 14, 2025, Vitomir Maričić broke Šobat’s record with a time of 29 minutes and 3 seconds under water. At time of publication, Šobat was training to break the record once again.