Patrick Musimu

Patrick Musimu was a Belgian freediver who was born in Kinshasa in what was then Zaire in 1970 and died in 2011. He began diving in 1999 at the age of 28 and became known for an unusual ear clearing method in which he flooded his sinuses and middle ears with seawater before the depth at which ordinary equalizing becomes hard. On 30 June 2005 he dived to 209 meters in the No Limits discipline, beating the previous mark by almost forty meters, in a dive he had arranged without the supervision of the international freediving association he had left in 2002. He also worked as a physiotherapist and a sport business and event manager, and he held that extreme deep diving was an adventure rather than a sport. He died in July 2011 while training alone in a pool in Brussels.