The Badass Story of Shavarsh Karapetyan, the Russian Swimmer Who Saved Dozens of Lives
Swimming super star Shavarsh Karapetyan was shut out of Olympic 1976. Fortunately for 37 souls bound for a watery grave, fate had something greater in store for the 23-year-old athlete.
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Russian beefcake Shavarsh Karapetyan was a swimming superstar bound for greatness at the 1976 Montreal Olympics when internal politics cock-blocked him from the team and shut him out of his gold medal dreams.
Thankfully for 37 fortunate souls bound for a watery grave, fate had something greater in store for the 23-year-old athlete.
This is the badass story of Shavarsh Karapetyan.
In 1953, Karapetyan was born in Kirovakan, Armenia. By the looks of him, he came out of his mama a full-grown-ass man. After eight years of schooling, Mother Russia felt that was enough for the young comrade and sent him off to auto-mechanic school.
Meanwhile, Karapetyan became an accomplished finswimmer. If you’re like, “What the fuck is finswimming?,” welcome to the club, we’ve done the Googling for you. Finswimming is a sport in which athletes make themselves as fish-like as possible by wearing a monofin and a mask, holding their breath for insane lengths of time, and propelling themselves through the water like freak shark people. It looks cool as shit, and you should totally YouTube it.
By the time he was 23, Karapetyan was one of the world’s best finswimmers, bagging 17 world championships, 13 European championships, and 7 USSR championships, and broke 11 world records. He was also *ahem* not too hard on the eyes.
Karapetyan was considered a shoo-in to represent the USSR at the 1976 Olympics in Montreal when politics shut him out of the team. Soviet Coach Liparit Almasakyan stood on business for Karapetyan and backed out of coaching the team. Instead, he was like, “Fuck your politics, I’ll train Karapetyan and make him into even more of a beast.”
On September 16, 1976, as part of an absolutely fucking brutal training regimen Almasakyan designed for Karapetyan, the young athlete was running 12 miles around Yerevan Lake with 44-pound weights on his back. Almasakyan and Karapetyan’s brother, Kamo, followed close behind.
As he neared the end of his run, a trolleybus on a nearby road veered off course and plummeted downhill and into the cold waters of the lake, rapidly swallowed by its dark waters. Ninety-two people were inside as it sank 33 feet to the bottom of the lake.
Fucking badass that he was, Karapetyan’s response was immediate, diving into the waters while shouting instructions to Almasakyan and Kamo to stand by.
On his first dive, Karapetyan kicked the glass out of one of the trolleybus’s windows to create an exit for the drowning passengers. He dove into the water 38 more times, resurfacing with a rescued passenger and passing them to Almasakyan and Kamo, who helped them to shore.
Each time he went down, he swam through shards of broken glass and was nearly blind in the dark, murky lake waters as he felt for passengers. On his last dive, Karapetyan came to the surface to realize he had grabbed a cushion, not a person, and his heart broke.
“I could have saved a life instead. That seat still haunts me in my nightmares,” he told the media years later.
Karapetyan pulled 37 people from the water that day, and others were able to swim out on their own from the window he broke. It’s reported that only 20 survived the ordeal.
Karapetyan sustained severe cuts from the broken glass, and came down with sepsis and double pneumonia for his efforts. He was hospitalized for 45 days while recovering.
Incredible shit, huh?
What’s more, is that the story remained largely under wraps, as the Soviet government didn’t really want people to know about how fucking shitty their public transit was, so they kept it out of the media. Witnesses and survivors talked, however, and the story of Karapetyan’s absolutely fucking baller rescue efforts became something of an urban legend until 1982, when a newspaper published the first media story about the crash.
When asked about his selfless act of badassery that could have cost him his life, he replied, “I was simply closer to the crash than anyone else.” We love a humble King.
After the rescue, Karapetyan never fully returned as the finswimmer he once was and eventually hung up his fins.
But, he did make it to the Olympics. At the 2014 opening ceremony in Sochi, Karapetyan carried the Olympic torch.
We’re not crying, you’re crying!
