Video: The humble superman of Soviet sports: How a champion swimmer saved the lives of more than 20 people
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
Today he would be called Superman, but unfortunately the name Shavarsha Karapetyan hardly known to the general public. A professional athlete, swimmer-submariner, multiple world champion, by some miracle, constantly found himself where tragedies and disasters happened, and came to the aid of people. To save them, he had to sacrifice his own future in the world of big-time sports.
The future hero was born in 1953 in an ordinary Armenian family. His father was fond of sports, and Shavarsh took an example from him from childhood. He was sent to swim, and after a year after hard training he became the champion of the republic among young men in backstroke and freestyle. Then he decided to go scuba diving and after six months he became the winner in the very first competition. His coach instilled in him the installation: "There is no worthy second place", and Shavarsh carried it out in life. The athlete won 37 gold medals and set 10 world records.
One day in the winter of 1974, Shavarsh Karapetyan was returning home from a sports base along a mountain road. Besides him, there were about 30 more passengers on the bus. On the rise, the engine suddenly stalled, and the driver got out of the cab. Suddenly, the bus started off and rolled towards the gorge. Shavarsh rushed to the driver's cabin, broke the glass wall separating it from the passenger compartment, and abruptly turned the steering wheel towards the mountain. Thanks to his reaction, no one was hurt.
Every morning Shavarsh, together with his brother, jogged around Lake Yerevan. So it was on September 16, 1976. Suddenly, before his eyes, an overcrowded trolleybus at full speed turned off the road, fell into the water and quickly went to the bottom. The athlete immediately rushed into the lake, smashed the glass in the cabin with his feet and began to lift people from a 10-meter depth to the surface. The brother received people and handed them over to doctors. The swimmer did not pay attention to the cuts that he received when he broke the glass, or to the low temperature of the water - it was in September.
Later Shavarsh Karapetyan recalled: "". The protocol recorded that the driver had a heart attack, and therefore the bus lost control. Surviving witnesses said that in fact the cause of the accident was a quarrel between one of the passengers and the driver, who refused to stop at the dam in the wrong place and received a blow to the back of the head for this.
For a long time the champion could not forgive himself for one mistake he was talking about: "".
This feat cost the champion his sports career. After 40 minutes in cold water, Karapetyan developed bilateral pneumonia and spent a month and a half in the hospital. He tried to return to big sport, but it was difficult to reach the previous heights with damaged lungs. In 1977, the athlete set his last, 11th world record at a distance of 400 meters, and in 1980 he decided to retire from the sport. He got married soon after, in the 1990s. moved to Moscow and went into business.
Surprisingly, the newspapers wrote about the tragedy on Lake Yerevan only a few years later, and even then they only named the number of people rescued, but they kept silent about the dead - in the USSR, trolleybuses were not supposed to fall into the water! Therefore, the name of Karapetyan remained unknown to many. Meanwhile, fate was preparing another test for the champion. In 1985, he was at work in an office when suddenly a fire broke out in the building opposite. And he rushed to help again. As a result, he received severe burns, doctors said that he miraculously survived.
Today Shavarsh Karapetyan is 64 years old, his main pride is two daughters and a son who is also engaged in scuba diving. The person who saved the lives of dozens of other people admits: "".
1976 was remembered not only for the tragedy on the Yerevan Lake: colorful photographs taken on the territory of the USSR in 1976
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