Shavarsh Karapetyan - Honored Master of Sports, one of the best athletes in the world in the discipline "scuba diving". Multiple champion of the world, Europe and the USSR, he has 11 world records. Throughout his life he had to save people more than once.
Sports career
Shavarsh Vladimirovich Karapetyan was born on May 19, 1953 in the Armenian city of Vanadzor in 1964, and moved to Yerevan with his family. Shavarsh became interested in sports from a very young age, his father Vladimir saw in his son a great athlete and helped him in all sports endeavors. Together with his father, they seriously thought to conquer the world of gymnastics, but a friend of his father, a repeated champion in this sport, said that Shavarsh was too tall for gymnastics and advised him to go in for classic swimming.
Shavarsh heeded the advice and already in 1970 won the republic championship, having won his first league title. The triumph of the young champion did not last long, great sport is always filled with intrigue and undercover struggle, as a result of which Karapetyan was expelled from the national team with the phrase “as unpromising”. It was a hard blow for a novice 17-year-old athlete.
And then he left the classic swimming and went underwater, in which he achieved significant results, won many victories and won all possible titles. A year after the start of training at the USSR Championship, he appears in all disciplines and wins the 2nd and 2nd third places. The next achievement and a real triumph is the 1972 European Championship, where he went already in the main team and won 3 gold medals: 1 silver, 1 bronze and set 2 world records. In the next 4 years, he added another 41 gold medals to his piggy bank and set 8 world records. In 1976, Shavarsh’s sports career was actually completed, by this time he had become the European champion 13 times, 17 times the world champion, set 11 world records and became a real diving legend.
Underwater sports began in the middle of the 20th century. Today, this sport includes a fairly large number of disciplines: diving, spearfishing, swimming in flippers, apnea and more.
Saving people
In 1974, returning from training camp with his teammates and coaches, Shavarsh saved the lives of several dozen people for the first time. The team of athletes went from the training camp to Yerevan on a regular regular bus, on a mountain road the vehicle engine began to junk and soon completely died out. The driver got out and started messing around in the engine compartment, at which time the bus suddenly rolled to the edge of the road, right into the abyss.
Karapetyan, who was closest to the driver’s cab, quickly orientated himself in the situation. In a matter of seconds, he broke the window separating the driver’s compartment from the passenger, reached for the steering wheel and turned it around, the bus buried itself in the mountain and stopped. Thanks to lightning-fast actions, Shavarsh managed to save his life and the lives of other people who were on the bus.
The next time, Shavarsh saved only the lives of other people, risking losing his own. On September 16, 1976, Karapetyan made the usual cross-race along the shore of Lake Yerevan and became a witness to a terrible accident. Right in front of Shavarsh's eyes, a crowded trolley flew from the dam into the water of the lake and literally went to the bottom in a few seconds.
And this time, Karapetyan makes a lightning decision and dives into the cold muddy water of the lake. At a depth of 10 meters with very poor visibility, he manages to kick the rear window of the trolley with his feet and begin to save the dying people. In twenty minutes he managed to pull out 20 people from the other side of the world. He raised a significantly larger number of people to the surface, but only 20 survived, the doctors could no longer help the rest.
If drowning people cling to their savior, they are prevented from moving, they are pulled to the bottom, you should relax and start drowning with them. Sinking instinctively let go and swim upward, giving the opportunity to grab them more conveniently and save.
For the third time, Shavarsh Karapetyan saved the lives of people on fire in the Yerevan Sports and Concert Complex on February 19, 1985. He was one of the first at the scene of the fire and began to help rescuers, having received burns and injuries.
Saving people in cold water, Shavarsh earned bilateral pneumonia followed by blood poisoning and ended up in the hospital. It was not possible to completely restore health, which was the reason for the end of his sports career. Big sport, he finally left in 1980.
