On February 25, freediver Dmitry Sokolov swam 100 meters under a 50 cm-thick sheet of ice covering the world's largest freshwater lake: Baikal, in Russia’s Siberia. He managed to hold his breath for a record 1 minute and 37 seconds, the head of the project "The Irkutsk Region Record Book" Galina Azheeva told RIA Novosti.
It is just an extraordinary feat for the whole of Siberia, experts agree, given the extremely low water temperature – just 0 °C — and freezing air of around —12 °C. On top of that, the sportsman had to move in darkness due to a thick layer of ice just above him, while attached to a rope to vector him along the way.
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Sokolov, who is a diving coach at the Irkutsk Regional Federation of Underwater Hunting and Freediving school, performed a preparatory dive back in January. At that point, he covered a distance of 80 meters in 1 minute 24 seconds.
