Shavarsh Karapetyan

Shavarsh Vladimirovich Karapetyan, born on 19 May 1953 in Kirovakan, now Vanadzor, in Soviet Armenia, is a Soviet-Armenian former finswimmer. His family moved to Yerevan in 1964, where he learned swimming at a young age and later switched to finswimming. He became a Merited Master of Sports of the USSR and an eleven-time world record-breaker in finswimming, winning 7 Soviet championships, 13 European championships and 17 world championships, a total of 37 gold medals, by the time he retired at the age of 24. He is best known for saving the lives of 20 people on 16 September 1976, when a trolleybus fell into Yerevan Lake and he dived repeatedly to break open its rear window. The lung damage from that rescue ended his sports career, and he later founded the Shavarsh Karapetyan Foundation to support young swimmers.