Shavarsh Karapetyan

Background

Karapetyan was born in 1953 in Armenia"s third largest city of Kirovakan (now called Vanadzor), then part of the Soviet Union.

Education

His family moved to Yerevan in 1964, where Shavarsh finished eight years of school and then attended a technical school of auto-mechanics. On that day, training with his brother Kamo, also a finswimmer, by running alongside the Yerevan Lake, Karapetyan had just completed his usual distance of 20 km (12 mi) when he heard the sound of a crash and saw a sinking trolleybus which had become out of control and fallen from a dam wall.

Career

By the advice of family friends, he started to learn swimming at a young age. He later switched to finswimming. In 1975-1976, Karapetyan served in a Soviet Air Defence Forces base in the Baku military district.

Karapetyan, Honored Master of Sports of the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics, ten-time finswimming World Record-breaker, is better known in the former Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics for an incident which occurred on September the 16th, 1976.

The trolleybus lay at the bottom of the reservoir some 25 metres (80 ft) offshore at a depth of 10 metres (33 ft). Karapetyan swam to it and, despite conditions of almost zero visibility, due to the silt rising from the bottom, broke the back window with his legs.

The trolleybus was crowded, it carried 92 passengers and Karapetyan knew he had little time, spending some 30 to 35 seconds for each person he saved. Karapetyan managed to rescue 20 people (he picked up more, but 20 of them survived), but this ended his sports career: the combined effect of cold water and the multiple wounds he received (scratched by glass), left him unconscious for 45 days.

Subsequent sepsis, due to the presence of raw sewage in the lake water, and lung complications prevented him from continuing his sports career.

All related photos were kept at the district attorney’s office and were only published two years later. He was awarded a medal "Foreign The Rescue of the Drowning" and the Order of the Badge of Honor. This publication revealed that he was the rescuer.

And he received about 60,000 letters.

On February 19, 1985, Shavarsh just happened to be near a burning building, that had people trapped inside. He rushed in and started pulling people out without a second thought.

Once again, he was badly hurt (severe burns) and spent a long time in the hospital. He later moved to Moscow and founded a shoe company called “Second Breath”.

Karapetyan was later awarded a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization “Fair Play” award for his heroism.

A main belt asteroid, 3027 Shavarsh, discovered by Nikolai Chernykh, was named after him (approved by the MPC in September 1986). He regularly visits Armenia and the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic. Karapetyan took part in the 2014 Winter Olympics torch relay for the second stage of the race.

He was passed the torch in Moscow and carried it towards Krasnogorsk.

The next day, Karapetyan carried the torch for a second time. He also stated in an interview, "I was carrying the torch for Russia and for Armenia.".

Achievements

• Karapetyan"s achievement was not immediately recognized. His name became a household name in the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics on October 12, 1982, when Komsomolskaya Pravda published an article on his feat, entitled "The Underwater Battle of the Champion".