MR PORTER gets deep with the freediving champion and Panerai ambassador.

Mr Guillaume Néry is a real-life merman, a sea-exploring marvel who regularly dives more than 100-metres deep without oxygen and only a fin for propulsion. His descent to the depths sounds otherworldly. “There’s no landscape – it’s just blue, but the change of the colour is amazing to watch.” He starts off buoyant, with his lungs full of air and slowly swims down, then at minus-25 metres, he’s “falling without movement for about 95 to 125 metres. The freefall is amazing because you’re just free – you’re flying in the water.”

We meet in the Bay of Villefranche, aboard Eilean, the beautiful Panerai yacht (the boat Duran Duran filmed their “Rio” video on back in 1982) on which he’s set multiple world records. Mr Néry is proud to be an ambassador for the Italian-Swiss watch brand, which began life as a provider of military equipment for the Italian Royal Navy in the early 20th century. “It represents my world. It has a strong relationship with the sea and my quest is discovering the sea, so I’m very proud to be part of this team.” In keeping with his subaquatic lifestyle, Mr Néry wears the brand’s Luminor Submersible 1950, a specialist diving watch whose 300-metre water-resistance rating makes it more than capable of matching his descent to the depths.

On board the Panerai, it becomes clear that the stars aligned to make Mr Néry the multiple world record-breaking freediver he is: growing up by the sea, having exceptionally large lungs (a 10-litre capacity, twice as big as average), natural flexibility, mastery of technique and more. “In sport, when you reach the highest level, it’s always a combination of talent, genetics and circumstance. I have a lot of ease equalising without using my hands, which is like magic! And because I did a lot of mountain and endurance sport when I was very young, I developed a very slow metabolism. They’re all factors that I was lucky to discover.”

Despite growing up on the Mediterranean, Mr Néry didn’t come from a swimming or diving background, and only started edging towards the sport after losing a breath-holding competition on the school bus. After the bruising teenage defeat, he made it his mission to improve every day. “We held our breath and my friend won with two minutes, nine seconds – I remember exactly! I lost, so I trained at home, then step-by-step, it went to two minutes, three minutes, and at 14, I was able to hold my breath between four and five minutes.” (He can now do a static breath hold for eight minutes.) Then came the real coup de foudre... “I watched a documentary one day on TV about the legend of freediving in the 1990s, Umberto Pelizzari, an Italian guy who broke all the records. I fell in love, like, ‘Wow, it’s beautiful! I could use my breath-holding to dive deep, break records, discover the underwater world. I want to try.’”

Mr Néry found a freediving school in Nice – the only one in all of France at the time – and fell under the tutelage of Mr Claude Chapuis. “We call him Maître Yoda, because he’s always very wise,” laughs Mr Nery. “He’s not a trainer telling you to do 10 x 50 metres. He teaches a philosophy and a way of practising freediving. All the people who broke records here had Claude as a kind of master.” Since then, Mr Néry has dived all over the world, including Greece, The Galápagos Islands, Japan, and French Polynesia, where he lives for five months of the year. But home is where his heart is. “For deep diving, for records and pushing my limits, I have to say that the Mediterranean Sea is really my favourite place, especially the Bay of Villefranche. The Mediterranean is considered the roots of diving – Ancient Greece saw the first divers and the fishermen, so there’s a strong link between the old civilizations that were around the Mediterranean.”

Mr Néry is fascinated by this globally spread community of freedivers and made sure to meet up with the underwater hunting Bajaus people when he was in the Philippines. “There were famous images of the Bajau going down with wooden guns and walking on the sea floor. We met them and went diving with them. The idea was to meet some of the originators of freediving. It was amazing. They’re fishing at minus-35 metres. Some have fins, some walk on the floor.”

Over the years, Mr Néry has seen a range of sea creatures, too: sharks, whales, dolphins and sea lions. “Some animals are predators, but it doesn’t mean that they’re dangerous. We’re not part of their meal, but you need to be careful because they are wild animals.” In fact, his most scary underwater incident came when he dived to minus-139 metres, after organisers accidentally set the dive line 10 metres deeper than planned. He blacked out, suffered a lung barotrauma and retired from competition, but within a month was diving again and has gradually been returning to the depths.

Now though, Mr Néry has bigger ambitions for the sport. “One of my big challenges is to bring the magic of the underwater world to the outside and to show that with movies and workshops. I really try to show that the underwater world is for everybody. Everyone can go enjoy it. Of course, not everyone will go to 100 metres, but just get in the sea, put the mask on, look at the fish and discover this other world.”