AIDA World Championships Maribor 2007

Pages in this article 1  2   June 30, 2007 4:00 PM

Freediving Team Åland goes to World championship in Slovenia
Who would have tought, when three guys in the year of 2002 started the first freediving club on Åland, that one of our future team members would compete together with the freediving elite of the world? To be honest, I think that the tought never even crossed our mind.

But now, 5 years later, our friend, team member and source of inspiration Anders Larsson finally has qualified to compete together with the national team of Sweden in the world championship. For those of you that knows that our island belong to Finland, and therefor are confused with why he competes for Sweden, I will explain. Anders used to live in Skåne, Sweden, but recently moved to Åland. He has not been granted a finnish citizenship yet, and may not compete for Finland before he get it.

But since we have freediving friends in both Sweden and Finland, this is not a problem for us. We are happy just to come along to Slovenia and have a chance to see all the amazing atlethes, and meet our freediving friends and also make new ones.

Anders has a background as a swimmer and has thereby got amazing techniques and he is very comfortable in the water. His best techniques are in Dynamic Apnea without fins (DNF).

He will also compete in Dynamic Apnea with fins (DYN) and also Static Apnea (STA) where you lie still in the surface, holding your breath as long as you can.

Even though Anders is the competitor, we always point out to other people that we are a TEAM. We always try to help each other, with peptalk and idéas of improving our techniques. Everyone can't be best at everything, but everyone can be good at something. One may be good at making jokes and get the rest of the team in a good mood, while someone is good at finding news, facts and knowledge about freediving, another one is good at taking photos and filming, and someone else may know about homepages and internet and so on.

Everyone contributes in one way or another, wich makes the team reach way further than we could do individually.

We like to think that our team is pretty unique in the world of freediving, since freediving mainly is an individual sport where the goal is to be better than everyone else. But our concept is to just try to be better than your previous results and focus only on yourself while performing, instead of hunting the records of other freedivers. And so far it has been a very good concept.

More about the World Championship
This year, the world championship will take place in Maribor, Slovenia and is organized by a club called the H20 Team. But the main organizer is AIDA, wich is the official organization that gathers most of the freediving clubs all over the world.

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