By Sofía Barruti, CNN en Español
(CNN) — The water was calm that morning in the Okavango Delta, in Botswana. Belgian diver Alain Brandeleer remembers the visibility was good and that he felt no particular unease. He had spent much of his life seeking ever more extreme experiences in the water, swimming with sharks in different parts of the world — even with great whites, without a cage. Over time, the constant exposure to risk had stopped giving him an adrenaline rush. And when that happens, he said, a question appears that’s hard to ignore: what comes next?
That day, September 6, 2012, the answer was brutal. The water turned cloudy and thick. Visibility disappeared in a matter of seconds. He felt something brush against his legs, but didn’t fully register what it was at first. Then he understood. The body of a crocodile was wrapped around him, and it was biting his right arm.
One of his companions managed to hold him by the oxygen tank for more than a minute. Brandeleer would later say that saved his life.
“If he had let go for a second, I was dead,” he said.
After the attack came the wait. Hours passed before medics could attend to him, get him onto a helicopter and transfer him to a hospital in Johannesburg. During that time he didn’t even know for certain whether he still had his arm.
“I could feel the arm, but I didn’t know if it was there or not,” he recalled. The wetsuit was holding it in place.
When the doctors assessed Brandeleer they decided the arm had to be amputated.
It was a devastating blow. Brandeleer was born with an atrophy of his left hand. From a young age he had learned to live with that physical difference and to resist it defining him. The arm that had just been destroyed was his only fully functional one.
Over the years, water became the place where he could prove himself. First as a diver, then as a long-distance swimmer, he found in the sea a form of freedom. In the water he managed to push his own limits and realize that, in his case, those limits were often more mental than physical.
That’s why, when the doctors raised the option of amputation, his response was immediate. He recalls telling the doctor, with a calm that still surprises him today, that if that was the only option, he would rather not wake up from the anaesthesia.
Along with his quality of life, he was concerned about becoming a burden. For years he had supported his father — emotionally and financially — at a time when his health had deteriorated badly. That experience left a mark on him. “I promised myself I would never put my son in that situation,” he explained.
Trying to save the arm carried a very high probability of death by infection but faced with Brandeleer’s stubbornness, surgeons decided to try.
He survived, but his recovery was not straightforward. There were surgeries, complications and infections that tested his physical and mental resilience.
Returning to the water
But six months after the attack, he went back into the water.
He started with basic, almost exploratory movements, accompanied by a physiotherapist, as part of his rehabilitation. More than a sporting goal, it was a way of recovering a relationship with his own body.
Over time, he began to train several times a day. He adjusted movements. He tried, got frustrated, then tried again. Then, he told his physiotherapist he wanted to swim the English Channel. He didn’t do it, but the idea marked a shift. A year later, after several setbacks — including another injury and an infection — he set a goal to swim the Strait of Gibraltar.
He crossed the 8-mile passage in 2015, three years after the attack.
He didn’t stop there, swimming between Corsica and Sardinia in 2023. Each swim, he said, was a way to come to terms with what had happened t