Lewis Gordon Pugh
British environmental campaigner, maritime lawyer, and endurance swimmer.
My own feeling was that witnessing the explosion of an atomic bomb, and having to examine all the dead animals, had a profound effect on my father.
You don't know pain until you've had a stalactite in your cock.
There’s nothing more chilling than swimming across open sea, where recently there used to be a solid glacier.
Going against the tide has never been difficult for me. It wasn’t even a conscious decision but the natural consequence of following my own instinct.
I have seen what the challenge of the impossible does to some athlete's minds - once their minds accept that the impossible is achievable, their bodies soon follow.
I resolved to follow my dream. I wanted to push every boundary. I wanted to swim further than anyone else. I wanted to cross seas and round capes that no one had dreamed of swimming before. And I wanted to swim in waters that were so cold no one thought it was possible to survive in them. And though it promised to make me poor and would take away the security provided by a career in law, that didn’t worry me.
The right to have our environment protected for the benefit of present and future generations is our most important human right.
Look around the world. Wherever you damage the environment, you have conflict. We have had enough conflict in [South Africa] – now is the time for peace.
There is nothing more powerful than the made-up mind.
Nothing excited me more than opening up the atlas and seeing places and seas, imagining what they looked like and what kind of life the people had.
A thought came across my mind: if things go pear-shaped on this swim, how long will it take for my frozen body to sink the four and a half kilometers to the bottom of the ocean?
My love for the water would always be tempered by respect for dangers that must never be underestimated.
These are areas of unparalleled natural beauty to be handed to our children undisturbed. We are merely custodians. You would not build a toll plaza and an administration block in the Grand Canyon or next to the Victoria Falls or within any other World Heritage Site.”
Afterwards, I saw a visible transformation in Pugh, and was reminded again of the power of a single event to change a sportsperson's life radically. I have witnessed this twice in my career - once when Joel Stransky kicked the winning goal in the 1995 Rugby World Cup final, and now with Pugh's North Pole swim. Both became more complete and confident people after achieving such sporting milestones.
Never, ever did I think that there would be a debate in this arid country about which was more important – gas or water. We can survive without gas. We cannot live without water.
You must not dither - swim like you're running through a minefield.
I could not believe what I was seeing: everywhere there were whale bones. Thousands of them stacked on top of each other. They rose from the seabed almost to the surface of the water. There were big bones. I could make out many of them: rib bones, jaw bones, vertebrae. In some places they were piled so high that, when I took a stroke, my hands touched them. I thought of all the beautiful whales I’d seen around the coast of South Africa and Norway that add so much to the area. How many whales were hunted and brought to this island before having their carcasses burned for oil and their bones dumped in this way? It disgusted me to such an extent that I considered stopping the swim to move it elsewhere, but I decided I had to press on.
My father taught me to understand that not much was impossible, if you had a mind to go after it. What seems beyond you is only unreachable if that’s what you believe.
I have been haunted by that swim through the whale graveyard and haven’t been able to get the image of the bones out of my head. Man hunted whales almost to the point of extinction, not seeming to care that we would lose one of the wonders of the sea world forever. It is the coldness of the water in Antarctica that preserves the bones and makes it look like they were left there yesterday but I like to think they are there as a reminder of man’s potential for folly.
Ultimately I wanted to be a pioneer swimmer, a distant descendant of Scott, Amundsen and Hillary, except that I would be an explorer of the water.