Shavarsh Karapetyan
Shavarsh Karapetyan 
| |
|---|---|
| Name in Armenian | Շավարշ Կարապետյան |
| Birthplace | Vanadzor |
| Birth date | 19 May 1953 |
| Lived in | Vanadzor, Yerevan, Baku |
| Profession | Athlete |
| Languages | Armenian, Russian |
| Ethnicities | Armenian |
| Dialects | Eastern Armenian |
Shavarsh Vladimiri (Vladimirovich)[1] Karapetyan (Armenian: Շավարշ Կարապետյան; born May 19, 1953) is a retired Armenian finswimmer, best known for saving the lives of 20 people in a 1976 incident in Yerevan.
Biography
Karapetyan was born on May 19, 1953 in Armenia's third largest city of Kirovakan (now called Vanadzor), then part of the Soviet Union. His family moved to Yerevan in 1964, where Shavarsh finished eight years of school and then attended a technical school for auto-mechanics. By the advice of family friends, he started to learn swimming at a young age. He later switched to finswimming. In 1975-1976, Karapetyan served in a Soviet Air Defence Forces base in the Baku military district.
1976 trolleybus incident
Karapetyan is a Merited Master of Sports of the USSR and a ten-time World Record-breaker in finswimming. He became well known in the former USSR for his heroic actions of saving peoples' lives. On September 16, 1976 while jogging alongside Yerevan Lake with his brother Kamo, also a finswimmer, Karapetyan had just completed his usual distance of 20 km (12 mi) when he heard the sound of a crash and saw a sinking trolleybus which had gone out of control and fallen from a dam wall.[3]
The trolleybus lay at the bottom of the reservoir some 25 metres (80 ft) offshore at a depth of 10 metres (33 ft).[4] Karapetyan swam to it and, despite conditions of almost zero visibility, due to the silt rising from the bottom, broke the back window with his legs. The trolleybus was crowded, it carried 92 passengers, Karapetyan started bringing people up from the bottom of the lake, to his waiting brother.[5]
The combined effect of multiple lacerations from glass shards led to Karapetyan's hospitalization for 45 days,[4] as he developed pneumonia and sepsis. Subsequent lung complications prevented Karapetyan from continuing his sports career.[5]
Karapetyan's achievement was not immediately recognized. All related photos were kept at the district attorney’s office and were only published two years later. He was awarded the Medal "For the Salvation of the Drowning" and the Order of the Badge of Honor. His name became a household name in the USSR on October 12, 1982, when Komsomolskaya Pravda published the article on his feat, entitled "The Underwater Battle of the Champion". This publication revealed that he was the rescuer; and he received about 60,000 letters.
1985 burning building incident
On February 19, 1985, Shavarsh just happened to be near a burning building that had people trapped inside. He rushed in and started pulling people out without a second thought. Once again, he was badly hurt (severe burns) and spent a long time in the hospital.
Karapetyan was later awarded a UNESCO "Fair Play" award for his heroism.[6]
The main belt asteroid 3027 Shavarsh, in 1978 discovered by Nikolai Chernykh at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory, was named after him (approved by the MPC in September 1986).[7][1]
Karapetyan moved to Moscow where he founded a shoe company called "Second Breath". He regularly visits Armenia and the Nagorno-Karabakh.[8]
Karapetyan took part in the 2014 Winter Olympics torch relay for the second stage of the run. He was passed the torch in Moscow and carried it towards Krasnogorsk.[9] The next day, Karapetyan carried the torch for a second time. He also stated in an interview, "I was carrying the torch for Russia and for Armenia."
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavarsh_Karapetyan
Forty Years Later, Soviet Athlete's Life-Saving Heroics Remembered
WBUR
September 27, 2014
Nearly 40 years ago, a European swimming champion was out for a run in
his home country of Armenia -- then part of the U.S.S.R. -- when a
trolleybus went off the tracks and plunged into a nearby lake.
Shavarsh Karapetyan dove into the lake and saved dozens of lives.
Carl Schreck chronicled that afternoon and its impact on Karapetyan's life -- and swimming career -- in a piece for Grantland. Schreck joined Bill Littlefield on Only A Game.
BL: Before that day at the lake, the 23-year-old Karapetyan had won eight European swimming titles and set some world records along the way. So why was he running by himself in the Armenian capital that day instead of training with the Soviet team?
Several of those people were dead by the time he got them up, but he had no time and no possibility of figuring out who he was grabbing. - Carl Schreck
CS: He had been dropped from the Soviet national team. He thinks it's because the Soviets wanted to feature some younger swimmers. He had also suffered an illness earlier in the year but says he was fully recovered. It's unclear exactly why they dropped him from the team. What is clear is that he was extremely peeved and went out on a mission to train as hard as he could, which is why he was out running by the lake that day.
BL: Well, take us through what happened that afternoon at Lake Yerevan at the end of Karapetyan's 13-mile run?
CS: He was on the home stretch, and he came up onto a bridge right next to Lake Yerevan and all of a sudden he heard a commotion, looked to his left and saw that a trolleybus had sailed over the embankment, crashed into some cement at the base of the lake and rolled into the water.
He immediately stripped off his clothes. He swam out to the trolleybus -- it was about 80 feet from shore -- dove down to try to figure out if there was an open window or an open door. The area under water was just flooded with silt. It was just completely black. They couldn't see anything, and so Karapetyan decided that he had to kick in a window. So he did what he described as a karate kick -- bashed his leg through the window; shredded his leg -- and managed to jostle a window loose and then just started reaching inside for anything that felt human.
Finswimmers use flippers to help them swim below water. Karapetyan's training included breathing techniques that he needed to dive to the sunken trolleybus over and over again. (Paolo Bruno/Getty Images)
BL: According to your article, Karapetyan's training helped him a lot in his rescue mission. But it wasn't his classical swim training, was it?
CS: His sport was finswimming, which is a niche sport. So his training was specifically geared toward underwater swimming. And a lot of the work he did was outside of the water: a lot of very serious power training, a lot of running and also a lot of breathwork, specifically to hyperventilate before entering the water, which essentially -- the hyperventilation makes you less likely to feel the urge to come up to breathe. So he was an expert on this breathing technique, which he utilized then when he dove into the water and proceeded to swim down to the trolleybus.
BL: Karapetyan had been retrieving bodies for more than 20 minutes when rescue workers told him to stop. They said, "Don't kill yourself for nothing." How real was the warning?
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CS: There were an estimated 90 passengers in the bus at the time. He knew they had a limited window to survive down there, which added some urgency to his mission. And so they determined after 20 minutes that no one else could possibly be alive down there.
At that point he had hauled up, he and his brother estimate, about 30 to 35 people. Several of those people were dead by the time he got them up, but he had no time and no possibility of figuring out who he was grabbing from the bus.
BL: So, some number of people were saved by this guy. It must have made Karapetyan a national hero.
CS: Well, you would think so given the act itself and the remarkable coincidence that possibly the world's greatest underwater swimmer -- in a country where a small percentage of the population can even swim -- happened to be running by. But in fact, the Soviets as a rule hushed up any major accidents like this. The idea was that there's no way a Soviet trolleybus could fall into the water.
BL: So, if they hushed up the accident obviously they hushed up the heroic act.
CS: Exactly, exactly. Even the classified government report that came out didn't mention him at all.
BL: What happened next for Karapetyan? Did he ever get back to competitive swimming?
Even the classified government report that came out didn't mention him at all. - Carl Schreck CS: The rescue mission permanently damaged his lungs. He came down with pneumonia in both lungs. His temperature spiked that evening and his doctors say it's a miracle that he even survived. His condition was exacerbated by the fact that the reservoir was absolutely filthy and just filled with the industrial runoff. So, he was in bed for several weeks.
He managed to stand up a couple weeks later and he did manage to get up and walk around and was back in the pool three months later. By the time he got back to training he absolutely despised the water. He said he wasn't scared; he just hated it. But he pressed through. He's an incredibly competitive man. And he fought through it and within a year had returned to the Soviet Championships and managed to set his 11th and final world record.
BL: What is Karapetyan doing these days and how does he remember the occurrences of that day?
CS: He runs businesses in Moscow. He's lived in Moscow since the late 1980s. He's told the story quite a bit. His story is pretty well known in the former Soviet Union and ... I get the impression he, in some respects, is a little tired of talking about it. All his friends call him a very modest man, which was my impression of him as well -- so modest, in fact, when he was courting his soon-to-be wife in the early 1980s, he didn't even tell her about the incident. She only learned about it when a Soviet reporter dug up the story six years after it happened and it then made it into the official Soviet press.
http://onlyagame.wbur.org/2014/09/27/shavarsh-karapetyan-lake-yerevan
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