A hero not of our time. The feat of the swimmer Shavarsh Karapetyan

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

This man in his real life performed feats worthy of Hercules and Superman. Ovechkin and Kerzhakov cannot dream of his sporting achievements even in the most rosy dreams. However, today the name of Shavarsh Karapetyan does not mean anything to the majority.

An overweight, middle-aged man ran through the Kremlin with the Olympic torch. It was evident how incredibly difficult these hundreds of meters were given to him. Suddenly the torch went out. The FSO officer hastily re-ignited the flame from his lighter. The man continued to run, having reached the allotted meters and passing the baton.

And at this time, social networks have already exploded with schadenfreude - just dear, some official decided to take part in the Olympic relay and disgraced himself. The bloggers started speculating about the symbolism of the Olympic flame, burning from the lighter of a secret service officer, and did not even bother to figure out what kind of person the Moscow wind played a cruel joke with, and why he was among the torchbearers of the 2014 Olympics.

Shavarsh Vladimirovich Karapetyan was born on May 19, 1953 in the Armenian Vanadzor, in the family of Vladimir and Hasmik Karapetyan. The parents named their first child Shavarsh, in honor of a relative who died in the Great Patriotic War.

From childhood, the boy was introduced to sports, and he took it seriously in 1964, when the family moved to Yerevan. The father thought to send his son to artistic gymnastics, but the coaches said that the boy was too small, he would not go further than a master of sports. And this did not suit either Vladimir or Shavarsh - the sports ambition of the father and son was at their best.

At first, Shavarsh was engaged in classical swimming. At the age of 16, at the All-Union Spartakiad of Schoolchildren, he took places in the third ten, but a year later he won the republican championship in his age category.

Non-olympic legend

Who knows, perhaps Shavarsh Karapetyan would soon have shone at the Olympic Games, but unsportsmanlike circumstances intervened. The conflict between the coaches led to the fact that the guy was expelled from the Republican team as "unpromising".

The frustrated 17-year-old Shavarsh was helped by Liparit Almasakyan, who trained divers. So Shavarsh Karapetyan from classical swimming went to scuba diving.

Diving with fins, holding your breath and scuba diving is a technically more difficult sport than classic swimming. However, for uninitiated viewers, this discipline is not so visually interesting. This is probably why scuba diving is not included in the Olympic program.

Only this circumstance is the reason that only specialists remember about the great sports achievements of Shavarsh Karapetyan.

A year later, in a new discipline for himself, Shavarsh won silver and bronze at the USSR Championship. Considering that Soviet divers were considered among the strongest in the world, this was a significant success. But Shavarsh did not stop there. In August 1972, at his first European Championship, he won two gold medals and set two world records.

From that moment to the actual end of Shavarsh's career, only four years will pass. During this time, he will become a 17-time world champion, a 13-time European champion and a 10-time world record holder. By the time he was 23 years old in his sport, he had become a true legend.

But Shavarsh gave up his sports talent for the sake of saving people.

A feat beyond the bounds of the possible

For the first time, Shavarsh Karapetyan saved the lives of dozens of people in January 1974. The athlete, along with his teammates and coaches, was returning to Yerevan by bus from the famous alpine sports base in Tsaghkadzor. On a mountain road, the car started to malfunction, and the driver stopped for repairs. While the driver was busy in the engine, the bus suddenly rolled to the edge of the road, and after a few moments it could fall into the gorge.

Shavarsh, who was sitting closer to the driver's cab, took his bearings first. He smashed the glass wall of the cockpit and abruptly turned the steering wheel towards the mountain. Experts later said that in that situation it was the only correct decision. Thanks to him, the athlete himself survived, and another three dozen people.

On September 16, 1976, Shavarsh Karapetyan had a routine training session on the shores of Lake Yerevan. Together with him, his brother Kamo and coach Liparit Almasakyan made a jog.

Literally in front of their eyes, a trolleybus overcrowded with people flew off the road into the lake. In a matter of seconds, he went to the bottom.

According to the official version, the driver's heart attack was the cause of the accident. Much later, the real cause of the tragedy emerged - the driver grappled with a passenger who wanted to get out in the wrong place. The squabble between two overly temperamental southern men ended in failure.

The trolleybus ended up at a depth of 10 meters. Shavarsh made a decision with lightning speed - he will dive, and his brother and coach will take the victims to the shore.

It was an incredibly difficult task. The water in the Yerevan Lake was very cold, the visibility was practically zero. These "joys" were complemented by the fact that the waste of the capital of Soviet Armenia entered the lake.

Shavarsh dived 10 meters, kicked out the rear window of the trolleybus, and began to get the dying people.

The doctors and rescuers, who later analyzed the situation, came to the conclusion that what Shavarsh Karapetyan had done could hardly have been done by at least one more person in the world. His feat is akin to the feats of Hercules or Superman.

Even if he saved one, two, three people, it would be fantastic, given the conditions in which he had to act. Shavarsh Karapetyan literally brought 20 (!!!) people back from the other world.

In fact, the athlete pulled out significantly more victims, but doctors were no longer able to help many.

And Shavarsh himself, who did the impossible, said that he dreamed for a long time about the leather cushion of the trolleybus seat. During one of his dives, he grabbed her, mistaking her for a man. The swimmer realized his mistake only on the surface, and then for a very long time worried about the fact that by this he deprived someone of a chance for salvation.

A planet named Shavarsh

He stopped diving when all his physical and mental strength ran out. But before that, he still managed to hook the cable to the drowned trolleybus - the rescuers who arrived at the scene did not have scuba gear, and they could not repeat what the athlete did.

Shavarsh himself also ended up in the hospital - severe pneumonia, blood poisoning due to cuts on the glass in dirty water … He spent 45 days in a hospital bed. When he returned home, he was literally sick of the water. It was almost impossible to return to the sport. And, nevertheless, he returned, again amazed everyone. He returned to leave beautifully - in 1977 he set his last, 11th world record.

But it was only through "I can not." He left all his strength there, in the Yerevan Lake.

The big country did not immediately learn about his feat - they did not like to write about disasters in those days. And when I found out, tens of thousands of letters of gratitude were sent to Yerevan, with the simple address “Armenia, the city of Yerevan, to Shavarsh Karapetyan”.

What is understandable to ordinary people is not always clear to officials. The great athlete and great man Shavarsh Karapetyan did not become a Hero of the Soviet Union - he was awarded the Order of the Badge of Honor. On August 8, 1978, Soviet astronomer Nikolai Chernykh discovered asteroid number 3027, which the scientist named Shavarsh - in honor of the hero swimmer.

On February 19, 1985, the Sports and Concert Complex, the pride of the city, caught fire in Yerevan. The whole world was fighting the fire. Later, a volunteer was taken from the fire to the hospital, one of the first who rushed to fight the fire, leading people out of the danger zone. The volunteer who received burns, but saved several human lives, was Shavarsh Karapetyan.

In 1993, life turned out so that from Yerevan Shavarsh Karapetyan was forced to move to Moscow. He has a small shoe shop called Second Wind. He never complains about life, does not complain about fate.

His self-sacrifice could not but affect his health. For 60-year-old Shavarsh Vladimirovich Karapetyan, hundreds of meters of the Olympic relay that he had to run was a difficult test, but, as always, he managed to overcome difficulties.

And it is incredibly insulting that the Olympic torch went out in the hands of a person who least deserved such a fate.

Or maybe we just got it wrong? Maybe the Olympic flame didn’t go out, but bowed to the courage and greatness of Shavarsh Karapetyan? After all, the fire of the soul of this athlete and a real person, the fire that he disinterestedly gives to people, will never go out.