Shavarsh Karapetyan is an Honored Master of Sports, one of the world's best diving athletes. Multiple champion of the world, Europe and the USSR, he has 11 world records. Throughout his life, he had to save people more than once.
Sports career
Shavarsh Vladimirovich Karapetyan was born on May 19, 1953 in the Armenian city of Vanadzor in 1964, moved to Yerevan with his family. Shavarsh became interested in sports from an early age, his father Vladimir saw a great athlete in his son and helped him in all sports endeavors. Together with his father, they seriously thought to conquer the world of artistic gymnastics, but a friend of his father, a multiple champion in this sport, said that Shavarsh was too tall for gymnastics and advised him to take up classical swimming.
Shavarsh listened to the advice and already in 1970 he won the championship of the republic, having won his first champion title. The triumph of the young champion did not last long, big sport is always filled with intrigue and undercover struggle, as a result of which Karapetyan was expelled from the national team with the wording “as unpromising”. It was a tough blow for the aspiring 17-year-old athlete.
And then he left the classic swimming and took up scuba diving, in which he achieved significant results, won many victories and won all possible titles. A year after the start of training at the USSR Championship, he performs in all disciplines and wins 2nd and 2 third places. The next achievement and real triumph was the 1972 European Championship, where he went already in the main team and won 3 gold medals: 1 silver, 1 bronze and set 2 world records. In the next 4 years, he added 41 more gold medals to his piggy bank and set 8 world records. In 1976, Shavarsh's sports career was actually completed, by this time he had become the European champion 13 times, the world champion 17 times, set 11 world records and became a real scuba diving legend.
Underwater sports originated in the middle of the 20th century. Today, this sport includes a fairly large number of disciplines: diving, spearfishing, swimming with flippers, apnea, and more.
Saving people
In 1974, returning from the training camp with his teammates and coaches, Shavarsh saved the lives of several dozen people for the first time. The team of athletes was traveling from the training camp to Yerevan on a regular regular bus, on the high-mountain road the vehicle's engine began to junk and soon stalled completely. The driver got out and started messing around in the engine compartment, at which time the bus suddenly rolled to the edge of the road, right into the abyss.
Karapetyan, who was the closest to the driver's cab, quickly got his bearings in the situation. In a matter of seconds, he broke the window separating the driver's compartment from the passenger compartment, reached out to the steering wheel and turned it over, the bus buried itself in a mountain and stopped. Thanks to lightning-fast actions, Shavarsh managed to save his own life and the lives of other people who were on the bus.
The next time Shavarsh saved only the lives of other people, at the risk of losing his own. On September 16, 1976, Karapetyan made a usual cross-race along the shores of the Yerevan lake and witnessed a terrible accident. Right in front of Shavarsh's eyes, a trolleybus overcrowded with people flew off the dam into the water of the lake and in just a few seconds sank to the bottom.
And this time Karapetyan makes a lightning-fast decision and dives into the cold muddy water of the lake. At a depth of 10 meters, with very poor visibility, he manages to kick out the rear window of the trolleybus and start rescuing the dying people. In twenty minutes he managed to pull out literally 20 people from the other world. He raised a significantly larger number of people to the surface, but only 20 survived, the rest of the doctors could no longer help.
If drowning people cling to their savior, prevent them from moving, pull to the bottom, one should relax and start drowning with them. Drowning instinctively let go and float upward, making it possible to grab them more comfortably and save them.
For the third time, Shavarsh Karapetyan saved lives in a fire in the Yerevan Sports and Concert Complex on February 19, 1985. He was one of the first at the scene of the fire and began to help rescuers, having received burns and injuries.
Rescuing people in cold water, Shavarsh developed bilateral pneumonia with subsequent blood poisoning and was hospitalized. It was not possible to restore health completely, which was the reason for the end of his sports career. He finally left big sport in 1980.
After sports
In 1991, Karapetyan moved to Moscow, where he opened a shoe workshop "Second Wind". Now he owns several shops and cafes in the south of Moscow, as well as a chain of shoe shops. Shavrat Karapetyan has 2 daughters and a son.