'Human dolphin' breaks record
By Jacqui Goddard on Providenciales Island
July 23, 2003
The Australian

DUBBED the nearest thing humanity has to a dolphin, British woman Tanya
Streeter created history yesterday when she shattered one of the world's
most extreme sporting records.

Holding her breath for 3 minutes and 38 seconds, the 30-year-old Streeter
descended 122 metres into the ocean off the British West Indies and
resurfaced under her own power, breaking the previous freediving records
for men as well as women.

"I've never seen it as a case of conquering the depths or beating the sea.
I look on it as a privilege to be accepted in such a way by nature's most
powerful force."

By developing unique exercises to help her expand the rib cage - displacing
her heart by several centimetres - she can fill her lungs with six litres
of air. An average person can hold four litres. That allows her to survive
for just over six minutes at a time without breathing.

A team of 14 safety divers stationed at 20m intervals watched over her,
some of them suspended so deep it took them two hours to decompress before
they could resurface. As she neared the surface, her husband Paul freedived
20m to accompany her on the final stretch.

"This wasn't all about me, it was about us all as a team," said Streeter,
who performed her feat in a 2000m-deep ocean abyss off the Turks and Caicos
Islands in the British West Indies.

Named the world's most perfect athlete by Sports Illustrated magazine,
Streeter surpassed the previous women's record in the variable ballast
category by 26.9m and outstripped the previous men's limit by 1.9m. She is
believed to be the only woman in any sport to have exceeded a male world-
record performance. She now holds the world record in all four deep-sea
categories of freediving.

"As a freediver I'm using about 80 to 100 per cent of my lung capacity, but
when you usually breathe it's only about 30 per cent," she
explained. "Touch wood, I've never had evidence of any damage to my lungs."

Despite her extraordinary abilities, which have made her an object of
medical fascination, Streeter said: "Actually, I consider myself quite a
chicken. I would be scared witless to find my way halfway up Everest or on
the end of a parachute."