GG Stavros

Katerina Stavros free-dives the Aegean off her home island, five years in the national squad, comfortable at depths where the sea goes quiet and the mind has to go quieter. She teaches breath-work to tourists through the season and mends nets with her father when the boats come in. One session a week, and it runs long. Six hours, sometimes eight, whatever the fixture list wants, and between those days there is nothing at all, no quick match, no rematch, no reply, which opponents mistake for indifference and is in fact how she has always trained. Her moves are clean and her cube is late. Pressure, for a woman who works at forty metres on a single breath, is a strictly relative quantity.