Freediving: Mateusz Malina can continue his career!

Until recently, Mateusz Malina, the 2011 world vice-champion in free diving, was worried about his future career. Financial considerations prevented him from going to the championships in 2013. Now he has joined the “Grena Talents Forge” project, run by the medical company Grena, to support young talented athletes.

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Mateusz Malina, is the second young athlete that Grena Ltd. has taken under its wing under the “Grena Talents Forge” programme. The first brand ambassador in the world of sport is Sebastian Druszkiewicz, speed skater, member of the Polish national team at the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi 2014.

Wiesław Brodaczewski, Managing Director of Grena Ltd. ensures that the company is open to supporting young people who have passion and determination to pursue their dreams. – If we see that talent is followed by hard work and perseverance of a young person, and the obstacle in reaching the next level of career is finances, we are willing to extend a helping hand to such a player – adds Brodaczewski.

Malina’s talent and persistence in pursuing his goal cannot be denied. Free diving, considered one of the most difficult and extreme sports, Mateusz became interested in as a teenager. He comes from the mountains, from a small village Ustroń, where there was not even a swimming pool. It was there, without the help of coaches, that he started learning the difficult art of diving while holding his breath.

How did he do it? Although it is hard to believe, the world’s top freediver trained himself by watching instructional videos on the internet! Today, 28-year-old Malina holds the title of world vice-champion from 2011. In Greek Kalamata he dived 106 metres. He has also broken 24 Polish records.

In pool competitions he has equally impressive results: in static, i.e. holding your breath as long as possible under water without moving, Mateusz’s personal record is 9 minutes and 3 seconds. On the other hand, in the fin dynamics competition, i.e. swimming the longest possible distance under water, Malina’s maximum is 250 metres, and in the finless dynamics Mateusz’s record is 213 metres.

It is worth mentioning that Malina is the only one in Poland to have mastered the mouth fill technique, which involves the athlete taking air from his rapidly contracting lungs into his mouth to equalise the pressure in his ears.

The road to success was not an easy one. At the beginning, to be able to raise money for his studies and to develop his passion for diving, he went abroad, where he worked on the production line at a car factory. When he returned, he enrolled at the Faculty of Automatic Control and Robotics of the Cracow University of Technology and started to train.

He first tried his hand at Krakow’s Zakrzówek, a flooded quarry where a lot of people from all over Poland dive. The breakthrough in his development was a holiday trip to Egypt, to Dahab, the Mecca for divers. This is where you can find the blue hole, a specific cave, which resembles a huge well. The hole has a diameter of 50-60 metres and the bottom is about 95 metres deep.

“During this trip I dived under the guidance of a group of instructors. They were the ones who very quickly saw that I stood out from other divers because I could go deeper underwater than others. As a result, I came to Egypt as a 30-metre diver and left as a 90-metre diver. It was my great personal success,” – Malina recalls.

Source: Press Information