The Olympic swimmer dove 33 feet into darkness
The Olympic swimmer dove 33 feet into darkness, pulled 20 people from a sunken bus—and destroyed his career saving them. Then the Soviets buried his story.
His name is Shavarsh Karapetyan, and he’s the hero the world almost forgot.
September 16, 1976. Yerevan, Armenia. Shavarsh had just finished a brutal 12-mile training run with his brother Kamo along the Yerevan reservoir. He was 28 years old, an elite finswimmer—an Olympic-level athlete who swam underwater with fins at speeds most people couldn’t imagine. He held multiple world records. His body was a precision instrument honed through years of relentless training.
He was exhausted. Muscles depleted. Lungs burning from the run. Ready to rest.
Then he heard the screech of brakes and the sickening crash of metal hitting water.
A trolleybus—packed with morning commuters—had veered off the road and plunged off the dam into the reservoir. It sank immediately, disappearing beneath the surface with 92 people trapped inside.
Most people froze. Some screamed. Some ran for help.
Shavarsh ran toward the water.
His brother Kamo yelled after him, but Shavarsh was already sprinting. His body was screaming at him to stop—he’d just run 12 miles, he had nothing left, his muscles were depleted—but none of that mattered. People were drowning.
He dove in.
The trolleybus had sunk 80 feet offshore and settled 33 feet below the surface—deep enough that the water was pitch black, cold enough to trigger hypothermia in minutes. Shavarsh couldn’t see anything. Not his hands. Not the bus. Nothing but absolute darkness.
He had to find it by feel.
Swimming blind through murky water, lungs already compromised from his training run, Shavarsh finally touched metal. The bus. He’d found it.
Now he had to get inside.
The doors were jammed shut by water pressure. Windows were intact. The bus was a sealed metal coffin with dozens of people dying inside it. Shavarsh positioned himself at the rear window and started kicking with his legs—using his feet as hammers to shatter the glass.
The glass broke. So did his legs. Shards tore through his flesh as he smashed through the window, but he kept going, ripping the opening wider with his bare hands until it was large enough to pull someone through….
