Dramatic video shows unconscious US synchronised swimmer Anita Alvarez being dragged out of pool

Dramatic footage has emerged showing the moment unconscious US synchronised swimmer Anita Alvarez was dragged out of a pool in Budapest after fainting in the water as she finished her routine at the World Championship yesterday. 

Coach Andrea Fuentes had to plunge into the water to rescue 25-year-old Alvarez after lifeguards failed to react as she sunk in the pool.

Amazingly, it is the second time Fuentes has saved the swimmer after she was filmed diving in and pulling her to safety when she fainted in the pool during an Olympics qualifying event in Barcelona last year. 

Alvarez regained consciousness soon after being rescued from the Budapest pool, received immediate first aid and is reportedly recovering well. Footage of yesterday’s event shows the US swim team celebrating as Alvarez finishes her solo routine before realising something is wrong and moments later, the 25-year-old is seen being dragged from the pool by Fuentes and a male lifeguard. 

Fuentes later revealed Alvarez stopped breathing for ‘at least two minutes’ during the ordeal following her performance in the women’s solo free event. 

‘I tried to wake her up. Well, I slapped her and opened her jaw. But the truth is that until after we got to the emergency room, she did not breathe for at least two minutes,’ Fuentes said during a Spanish-language interview last night. 

The US coach, who was critical of lifeguards after the near-tragedy, had said last night a decision on whether Alvarez would swim in the free team finals tomorrow would be taken on medical advice. But today the 39-year-old mum-of-one said Alvarez was determined not to abandon the World Championships.

She told Spanish daily El Mundo: ‘She doesn’t want to leave here with the photo of her unconscious at the bottom of the pool. In any case in the team events Anita does a lot of pirouettes and very few apneas so she will almost certainly compete.’

‘It was a big scare. I had to jump in because the lifeguards weren’t doing it,’ Fuentes said afterwards. ‘I was scared because I saw she wasn’t breathing, but now she is doing very well. Anita is doing much better.’

The American swim team was visibly distressed by the horrific incident and were seen consoling each other by the pool afterwards.

Fuentes said she realised something was wrong when Alvarez ‘went down and didn’t react’ rather than coming up after her routine. ‘When a swimmer finishes, the first thing they want to do is breathe,’ she said. 

The coach said she motioned to lifeguards for help but they did not see her, ‘so I jumped in myself. I went there as fast as I could. I went in even faster than when I was going for Olympic medals.’

Fuentes said Alvarez ‘was not breathing’ when she reached her but was revived and checked for signs of damage after the terrifying incident. 

‘Oxygen, glucose, heart, blood pressure, everything’s fine,’ she said, adding that Alvarez will rest today before returning to the pool because ‘she has to swim the final’.

Speaking in an interview on radio in Spanish, the coach said: ‘We have looked at many things and the pressure is good. We’ve done a CT scan on his brain, she’s fine.’

‘It has been, as you know, sometimes we see it happing in sport, cyclists, marathons in athletics vomit many times. She told me why? 

‘I said, as athletes, we dedicate ourselves to discovering where the limit is and sometimes we find it, and today you have found it, you have gone so far that your body said, girl, don’t ask me anything else.’  

She added: ‘In our sport it happens sometimes, when we go without breathing for a long time, with very high pulses and sometimes the oxygen not getting where it has to get, we faint.

‘But it is that we spend many hours in sync. What happens is, we do exercises to endure as much as possible for the competition, and today it happened during the competition.’

Alvarez told WIVB-TV she had fainted in previous training schedules, blaming the episodes on her demanding schedule. 

Speaking to Spectrum News after she fainted in Barcelona last year, Alvarez said she had been in the pool for 14 hours the day before the incident. 

‘I didn’t get enough sleep, honestly. By the time we got back, I had to be up at like 5:30 again the next morning to go back.’ 

She described a sensation of being in a ‘hamster wheel’ before losing consciousness. 

‘I could see the ceiling spinning, and that’s the last thing I remember until I got to the wall.’ 

USA Artistic Swimming said in a statement:  ‘Watching yesterday’s medical emergency of 2x Olympian Anita Alvarez and subsequent rescue by coach Andrea Fuentes was heartbreaking for our community. 

‘She gave an exceptional solo performance and competed brilliantly in four preliminary and three final competitions across six days. 

‘Anita has been evaluated by medical staff and will continue to be monitored. She is feeling much better and using today to rest. 

‘Whether or not she will swim in the free team final on Friday, June 24th will be determined by Anita and expert medical staff.’

Fuentes summed up the situation by posting a statement on Instagram.

‘Anita is okay – the doctors checked all vitals and everything is normal: heart rate, oxygen, sugar levels, blood pressure, etc… all is okay,’ she wrote.

‘We sometimes forget that this happens in other high-endurance sports. Marathon, cycling, cross country… we have all seen images where some athletes don’t make it to the finish line and others help them to get there.

‘Our sport is no different to others, just in a pool, we push through limits and sometimes we find them.

‘Anita feels good now and the doctors also say she is okay. Tomorrow she will rest all day and decide with the doctor if she can swim free team finals or not.’ 

It’s not the first time Alvarez has passed out in the pool.

Last year the 25-year-old fainted during an Olympics qualifying event in Barcelona, where she was also rescued by Fuentes. 

‘Unfortunately I’ve seen it happen to her before – never in competition, though,’ Alvarez’s mother Karen said at the time.

‘I knew right away. On their last element, I could tell something was up. It was hard to watch, definitely.’ 

Alvarez finished seventh in the event, which was won by Japan’s Yukiko Inui. 

Most synchronised swimming routines require athletes to hold their breath for no more than one minute at a time.

In 2010, Olympic medal winner Fran Crippen died in an open water swimming event in the UAE.

The long distance champion was aged 26 when he competed in the 10,000m event.

Fellow swimmers only noticed he was missing when they reached the finish line, sparking a desperate search to find him.

His body was found two hours after the end of the race by deep sea divers 500 yards from the shore.

Other swimmers at the time said heat may have been a factor, with water temperature at 30C and competitors reporting heat-related symptoms after completing the race.

A report found Crippen died of a ‘cardiac abnormality’. 

In 2015, a Dartmouth College swimmer died at a YMCA pool after making an attempt to complete four laps underwater without surfacing to breathe.

Tate Ramsden, 21, of Nashville, Tennessee, was pronounced dead at the Sarasota pool in Florida after lifeguards and emergency medical personnel could not revive him, according to the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office incident report.

Ramsden was at the pool with his sister, uncle and a cousin.

‘Tate had been swimming laps in the pool for some time and I was told he had swam approximately 4,000 yards before practicing his underwater swimming techniques,’ Officer Douglas Stidham wrote in the report. ‘It is believed he was likely attempting to complete a ‘100’ which is four laps across the pool without surfacing for air.’

At some point, Ramsden’s sister and cousin noticed that he was not moving underwater, and they alerted lifeguards who pulled him out of the water, Stidham wrote.

Water and blood came pouring from Ramsden’s nose and mouth throughout the attempts to revive him, according to the report.