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“Would I swim in pools, I wouldn’t go on swimming expeditions”

The Olympics. The Tour de France. Throughout my childhood, such peak athletic events fascinated me during the day and haunted my dreams at night. And this was not because the media so widely covered them, or because of the money and fame that success at them brought. It was the beauty of the sports and the toughness and obsessive behavior shown by the athletes that captivated me.

I have never lost this fascination, which drove me to select physical education as my major at my university and to get a certificate as a trainer of high-performance athletes. But this world of high-performance athletics did not satisfy me, as it did not fulfill me. Christof Gertsch was voted “Switzerland’s Sports Journalist of the Year” in 2014 and 2015. He joined me in investigating why high-performance athletics did not provide me with everything that I needed, and why I selected the path of being an “ambassador for water” to get there.

Christof Gertsch: Hasn’t every significant body of water capable of being swum already been traversed? The bodies with the coldest water, the longest river, the stormiest of all lakes. I would guess that everything has been achieved in this area. Ernst Bromeis: The opposite is the case. There is so much to be swum on this planet. But I am not surprised at your having this impression. Lewis Gordon Pugh is one of the best known of the world’s long-distance swimmers. In an interview in Forbes, Pugh recently stated “We’ve hit all of the world’s major landmarks. There’s really nothing left.”

And he’s not right? | I am not saying that swimmers like Pugh do not render extreme performances. But I find what their kind of swimming to be a kind of “circus feat”. Such swimmers adhere to rules orienting themselves upon those of the Channel Swimming Association. These lay down the permissible sizes of the swimming trunks, the dimensions of the boat accompanying swimmers—and that’s all. They don’t think big. I consider the “open water” scene to be very conservative. These stupid records—one kilometer in water of 1°, 500 meters in water whose temperature is below freezing—these are all just variations on the same theme. Our sticking to what has been predetermined will not allow swimming to develop. What I am looking for is swimming as a way of going on expeditions, as a way of exploring. And what is being explored is my inner being.

You are trying not to be part of the kind of athletics that is based upon classic ability to measure and to compare. Do you thus view yourself as being a freestyle swimmer—as opposed to an extreme one? | That is an important point. To understand its implications, let’s look at mountaineers. All that would be required to find out who is the fastest climber would be for the two competing against each other to be placed next to each other at the base of the mountain and to sound a starting gun.

That would be a kind of sport that the media would love to cover. But the climbers refuse to do such. They don’t want to bring head-to-head competition into climbing. It’s matter of principle to them. I take the same approach. Like them, I prefer not to engage in climbing which is completely measurable and comparable—that takes place in the artificial courses laid down on walls in climbing halls—and not outside in the mountains. Like the outdoor climbers, I am looking for experiences that do not represent compromises with the real thing. Perhaps you are right. Perhaps I am a sort of free solo climber for whom there is just her or him and the wall. And nothing else.

In your case, it’s you and the water—and nothing else. | Exactly. Nothing else, not even an accompanying boat.

But you haven’t quite gotten there yet. | No. And perhaps I will never be there. An accompanying boat has the same function as a refuge in the Alps. It is there to provide you with security against an emergency. The true ultimate risk would be to swim without a boat accompanying me. That was the case in my expedition in Graubünden, in which I swam a number of lakes without such a boat. But the dimensions of these lakes can not be compared those of the world’s great bodies of fresh water.

Is that what you are really looking for—being exposed to true risk? | My primary reason for mentioning the latter lakes was to show that there are still things to be done. What I am currently involved in is something else: the time that the expedition will take, the extremity of its undertaking. I want to go on adventures lasting weeks or even months. I am captivated by Russia’s Lake Ladoga, whose dimensions are 83 kilometers on its east-west axis and 219 kilometers on its north-south one. Ladoga is the largest lake in Europe. I am also fascinated by Asia’s Lake Baikal, which is referred to as the “holy lake”. It has a north-south length of more than 600 kilometers, and it is located in midst of the wilderness. In Baikal’s case, a “free solo” would be possible only on Baikal’s east-west axis, which is 90 kilometers long. Swimming Baikal along its north-south axis would be one of the great conceivable adventures. A premiere. That would be absolute loneliness. Someone will dare some day to try it.

The sponsors. The coverage by the media. The plans detailing each step along your way. Would you agree with my saying that your project displays a certain ambivalence? Your thrust is to achieve something that is in no way a compromise, something that is solely your own, that is totally different. And yet, at the same time, your expeditions contain a certain degree of marketing. | Yes, that is a contradiction. My striving is to find new ways of proceeding. Notwithstanding this, I do agree to compromises. This is because these ensure that the projects are worth doing from the financial point of view. When I embarked upon my new life as a long-distance swimmer, I knew that such expeditions would become my profession. I didn’t want to go to work every day and to swim in my free time. What this means to me today: sometimes I have to cede some of my ideals. I have to ask myself each time: what are my values? Which ones are really important to me? In which areas can I accede to sponsors’ requests in the least painful way? And, while doing such, how can I perform the task that I have assigned to myself of being an “ambassador for water”?

One way to completely avoid compromises would be to stand on the banks of a river or lake and to dive in, and to then swim to the other side—and to tell no one about your plans to do such. Perhaps your wife or your children—but no one else. | That would be a way. And you are probably thinking that I am a narcissist …

… No I am not. | Should you do such, you would be wrong. Here’s how I see things. A number of people have inspired me to proceed down this path—by undertaking adventures. And the only reason that I learned of these adventurers and their feats was because they told the stories of such in movies, articles and books. I love getting stories told to me. Had no one ever told their tales to the outside world, that might not precluded the creation of civilization. But this civilization would have developed in a different way and at a different pace than ours has. And that would have been a shame. I do of course wonder how far I should go with the marketing of my “miracle”. The only kind of story that will be covered nowadays is one like that of Felix Baumgartner, whose jump from space only took place at all due to the extreme marketing carried out on its behalf? Or like that of Bertrand Piccard, whose Solar Impulse project cost CHF 170 million? I hope that there is a path that lies between these two extremes—of no attention at all and unrestrained marketing. This is a prerequisite for my continuing to serve as an ambassador for water, one drawing the world’s attention to this precious and imperiled item.

You devote a great deal of energy to your swimming and to the protection of water. This devotion makes it hard for me to believe that you were really not a swimmer in pools when you were young. | Had I been a swimmer in pools, I would have never become a swimmer going on expeditions.

Why not? | Had I swum in pools, I would have never realized that swimming can be more than counting laps and the tiles lining the pool, that it doesn’t necessarily involve chlorine in your hair and nose. I was part of the world of high-performance sports long enough to know that it is a world that can bind you up. Please don’t misunderstand me. I find high-performance sports fascinating. Its athleticism. Its energy. They impress me. High-performance sports are, however, also a place in which the prime thrust is discipline. High-performance demands the uniformity, the discipline, the submission to hierarchies of a galley. For such sports, the listings of medals earned are the only criterion drawn upon when judging success or failure.

It is hardly an accident that people used to refer to sports as “physical exercise”, and that their pursuit was—and is—assigned to military departments. The beauty of motion, the art of athletics for athletics’ sake—this is being perverted and misused. The results of this are doping and corruption. High-performance sports have reached a deadend. They are experiencing the same fate as winter-time Alpine sports. Its business model had many decades of working well. And now it has to deal with the effects of climate change. No one knows how to counter this.

High-performance sports will hardly be able to rejuvenate themselves on their own. | I know that this is not a new insight. That doesn’t make it, however, any less true. High-performance sports constitute a world of their own. Anyone wanting to be part of has to observe the rules formulated for this world. Anyone not submitting to these rules will not be allowed to be part of this world.

High-performance sports hardly allow you to go your own way. Everything is predetermined. The system has an answer for every question. You do what the others do. And should you do something in another way, because you are one of the fortunate few who has the talent forcing the system to allow you to go your own way, you will be used as proof of the system’s not being as rigid as commonly believed.

This system doesn’t allow you to come in from outside and say: “Let’s do everything in a different way. Let’s change things.” It doesn’t work that way. If you want to do things in a different way, you’ve got to leave the system behind. It’s the same situation in other walks of life, such as banking. But we are going off on a tangent.

Not at all. That’s precisely what you did. You placed a want ad. You were the only one answering it. And you got the job—the job of being an ambassador for water. | That’s true. And that makes me vulnerable to attacks.

How? | There are those who say that the only reason that I am devoting myself to water is because I was not successful in the world of high-performance sports.

Do people really say that? | Not to my face, but definitely behind my back. What they should realize is that my emphasis has always been on the art of motion ever since I started studying for my qualification as a trainer of high-performance athletes. During the ensuing time, I developed this art. I am now living this philosophy of exemplifying the interplay between art and motion—and living up to my ambition of being an ambassador for water.

And how do high-performance athletes view this? | In 2012, I undertook my first expedition on the Rhine. In April of that year, there was a media event. It featured two top French swimmers. It took place in the hot springs in Vals and in the Rhine’s “Grand Canyon” in Graubünden. These swimmers—Camille Muffat4 and Yannik Agnel5 —won a couple of weeks later gold medals at the Olympics in London. Agnel was asked by journalists whether or he would like to swim the Rhine. His answer “Jamais. I would never dare to do that. Way too dangerous, way too cold, way too long. Jamais.” Agnel was, however, fascinated by the poetry and the ambitiousness of my mission.

Should you proceed down a path of making absolutely no compromises, should you just jump into the water and swim to the other side, and then get out and tell nobody about it, you would be completely unaffected by what people say. | I don’t want to be completely unaffected by that. And, especially, I don’t want what I do to not matter. I definitely do not view myself to be a prophet or something similar. God save me from that. I do, however, believe that the projects that I am pursuing will show new ways of proceeding. These are not intended to be a confrontation with high-performance sports. They may well constitute alternatives to it. There’s more to life than high-performance sports. Each of us human beings has a body and a mind. Case-inpoint is a swimmer who started swimming in pools at the age of 5 and then realized at the age of 18 that he didn’t want to do that any more. Our projects may cause him to rediscover the beauty of swimming—by going outside pools, to the places where swimming is something wonderful. Perhaps he will discover that swimming is something rewarding in and of itself, that it can also be a mission and an art form. I am devoting myself to making people see that swimming is poetry and that being an ambassador for water is a calling.