Taking a plunge in the Amazon — arguably the world’s most formidable river — is not for the faint-hearted. Piranhas, sharp-toothed sharks and deadly whirlpools are just a few of its perils, but they appear to have been no deterrent to Serbian Darko Novovic, who claims to have smashed the world record for swimming the South American river by 20 days.
The professional water polo player took 46 days to swim the river’s 5,450km — breaking the record of the previous holder, legendary Slovenian Martin Strel, according to Serbian news reports.
Novovic decided to take on the challenge after a ribbing from fellow Serbs about Strel, who held successive world records for swimming the Danube, Mississippi, Yangtze and Amazon and whose attempt to swim the latter was captured in the documentary Big Man River.
PHOTO: EPA
“Our folks in the diaspora made bets that I would overtake Martin Strel and that’s how it started,” Novovic told Serbian news agency SRNA.
It took Novovic two-and-a-half years to prepare for the challenge, which he finally began on Sept. 29, aiming to raise money for a church near Petrovac in Montenegro.
Novovic stressed that it had not been an easy trip from Altalaj in Peru to Belem in Brazil, swimming an average of 16 hours and 120km a day. He was buffeted by Amazonian winds and had to avoid dangerous whirlpools that can suck swimmers into their depths.
Amazon predators such as piran-has, sharks and anacondas were kept at bay by an improvised net cage suspended between boats that surrounded the 37-year-old, whose only brush with wildlife came when he had an encounter with a dead crocodile.
“When I saw him, I started to panic and manically swim faster. Only later on I realized the crocodile was dead and was eaten by piranhas,” the Nezavisne Novine daily reported him as saying. “I touched him and scratched my arm. I received anti-tetanus afterwards.”
The biggest challenge, he said, was the water itself.
“The water of the Amazon river is the most disgusting thing I ever experienced,” SRNA reported him as saying. “It makes the toxic Tamish [a local Serbian river] seem drinkable in comparison. I had three showers every day and I had three protective vaccines. The Amazon is yellow some days and green the next.”
A spokeswoman for Guinness World Records said it had not received an official notification.
“We would be very interested to hear of any claims,” she said.
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