An artistic swimmer who fainted and sank to the bottom of a competition pool during the FINA World Championships says she's "feeling much better".
Heart-stopping underwater images of Anita Alvarez's coach diving into the pool fully clothed to rescue her have been shared around the world.
The USA artistic swimming team said in a statement that watching the incident was "heartbreaking for our community", but that Alvarez was "already feeling much better".
Alvarez could return to competition if cleared by medical staff
The 25-year-old two-time Olympian shared on Instagram that she would provide a further update soon, and thanked supporters for their messages.
"In the meantime know that I am okay and healthy," she posted.
"Hope everyone can respect that my team and I still have two more days of competition to be focused on here in Budapest.
"Whether that's in the water for me or on the sidelines will be determined by myself and expert medical staff, but either way @artswimusa and I have a job to finish and I hope everyone can understand that."
The women's team free final, which Alvarez could compete in if she's cleared to do so, is scheduled for 4pm Friday afternoon local time (that's midnight Saturday AEST).
Coach knew something was wrong straight away
The coach who rescued her, fellow Olympian Andrea Fuentes, has shared pictures of Alvarez sitting around a dining table with her teammates, chatting and smiling.
Fuentes told Olympic Games reporter Nick McCarvel that she "saw it almost before it happened" after noticing that Alvarez's feet were going pale towards the end of her routine.
"I'm used to seeing them every day. I see them more than my kids. We train together eight hours a day, I know them very well," Fuentes says.
"As you could see, there's the moment where she finishes, instead of going up and staying, she went down.
"I know this is not normal because in our sport, the first thing you do when you finish is breathe, no? There's no option that you're going to go down to relax."
What about the lifeguards?
Fuentes says there were lifeguards on patrol at the event, but told MARCA that "I had to jump in because the lifeguards weren’t doing it".
"It was a good scare, to be honest," Fuentes told the Spanish publication.
Fuentes, who has been the head coach of Team USA's synchronised swimming team since 2018, is an experienced lifeguard herself and says she knew what to do.
"I immediately thought I was the fastest one arriving, I wanted her to be safe as fast as possible so I went as fast as I could," she told Nick McCarvel.
FINA's 2022 by-laws rule that competition venues "shall have adequate and fully equipped first-aid treatment facilities for competitors and officials and the public", and that "ambulance(s) shall be stationed on site during the whole championships/competition".
FINA hasn't released a media statement about the incident.
'It's nothing that's not normal in our sport'
Fuentes says fainting spells are actually pretty common for artistic swimmers, and that it can happen "many times" in training.
"Good athletes, we want to discover what the body can do," she says.
"In this case the body is asking you to breathe, but when you do artistic swimming you want to improve your lung capacity so in practice we push our limits.
In this week's scare, Alvarez was competing in the solo component of the competition.
"Nobody was there to just grab her leg like we do usually," Fuentes says.
"You see this happening in our sport, and for free divers also. You hold the oxygen too much, you pass out, a teammate pulls you out, breathe, rest and come back to practice.
"It's nothing that's not normal in our sport."
