Tragic news. Don’t these events have boats in the water monitoring the swimmers?
Even worse, they had to find the body later?
They didn’t see him floating immediately?
WTH?
He’s restin’.
They typically do have lifeguards in boats or kayaks to monitor the swimmers. But drowning in real life isn’t like in the movies. People can breathe in some water and trigger the body to go into a drowning state. The person doesn’t necessarily flail around. They can seem calm and may make slow paddling motions with their arms. And they can sink quickly. I would think an athlete might not have a lot of fat and wouldn’t have a lot of natural buoyancy. From the article it sounds like people noticed he was having problems. But if the water is murky, then he’d be difficult to find if he went under.
One thing that surprised me about this race is that they had the swim after the run. Typically, the swim is the first event in multi-sport competitions. I imagine one reason is to lessen the chance of fatigue from an earlier event contributing to drowning.
Something weird must have happened here. Wonder if he cramped up or had a heart issue. This doesn’t sound like a guy who was floundering if he was about to cross the finish line. I can understand them not jumping in to render aid if he was just about to finish, but I can’t understand how he went missing so quickly if he was at the finish line and people presumably watched him go under as this implies.
That’s what I’ve always thought as well.
It seems to me the reason triathlons are swim-bike-run is that if you have an accident in the water you have the highest chance of dying. Biking is next because of the speed your going at. Running has little risk of serious injury on a closed course. It certainly can hurt to faceplant or such, but it’s unlikely to do any permanent or deadly harm.
So you want to make it so people are most fatigued on the safest activity.
Something similar happened to a co-worker of mine a few years ago. He was swimming in a triathlon and had some kind of distress. He was taken to a hospital pretty quickly, but died. I don’t know if there was ever a specific cause determined.
The OP says this was a CrossFit competition, so it may not follow the classic swim-bike-run order that triathlons use.
They showed the footage on the local news tonight. That kind of seemed what may have happened. He goes from a regular stroke you’d expect to kind of doing a paddle. Then bobs for about two seconds, and goes under.
I wondered that, as well.
It’s CrossFit so it has to be more extreme(!).
Unfortunately this is nothing new. Even happens to world-class swimmers:
Bodies don’t usually float right away. A fresh corpse will sink to the bottom and it takes a day or two for decomposition to fill their cavities with gas, then it floats. Body composition and water temperature can affect buoyancy. Drowners do often float at first as there is usually still air in their lungs.
Drowning can happen even if there’s not a health issue. It doesn’t need a heart attack or anything like that. Simply breathing in a small amount of water could trigger the drowning response. It sometimes happens in these events when the swimmers are crowded together and someone breathes in water from the splashes that are getting kicked up. Once the drowning response happens, the person is kind of in autopilot mode. If they don’t get help, they may end up drowning regardless of their swimming ability.
One other aspect of the drowning response is that the person may frantically grab onto anything (or anyone) that comes near. It can be dangerous for untrained rescuers since the drowning person may end up pushing the rescuer under the water in their panicked state. The rescuers should throw a floation device to the drowning person so they don’t put themselves at risk.
In one of the Olympic interview segments I saw, they spoke to this synchronized swimmer who passed out during her routine back in 2022:
She immediately sank to the bottom and her coach dove in to save her. This isn’t the same situation as the person in the race, but it shows how quickly a drowning person can sink.