INTERVIEW: Marathon swimmer Ross Edgley pits himself against sharks
Photo: On Shark vs. Ross Edgley, hammerheads are one of the species investigated. Photo courtesy of National Geographic / Nathalie Miles / Provided by press site with permission.
For this year’s SharkFest on National Geographic, which continues throughout the summer, there’s a special program that finds marathon swimmer Ross Edgley trying to mimic the strengths and attributes of the most iconic shark species. This means he gets in the water and tries to see if he can match the speed, strength and even food intake of these beasts of the sea.
“It was two years in the making, and now people are actually seeing it,” Edgley said in a recent Zoom interview about Shark vs. Ross Edgley. “It all came around when we were swimming around Great Britain with the basking shark, the one that kept me accompanied for a day and a half. I think what was crazy is honestly this basking shark was taking 20 strokes with one tail flip. This basking shark was looking at me, kind of going, ‘Why are you making such hard work of this?’ … It was studying me, and I was studying it. From that, I sort of went away realizing just how bad a swimmer I was in terms of the animal kingdom.”
Then, Edgley started talking with experts at National Geographic, and they dreamed of a TV special that would pit the marathon swimmer against these sharks — not in a violent way, but a more competitive, fact-finding mission.
“Wouldn’t it be amazing to try and bring shark science to a new audience if you were to almost try to follow in their footsteps … by combining sport science and shark science,” he said of the original pitch. “I loved the idea because I always loved just having a goal and then reverse-engineering it and deconstructing it. We picked four sharks, and then we got to work. That was basically it.”
The first shark they considered was the great white, which is the one viewers often point to as the most engaging, probably because of the continued fascination with Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. This apex predator is simply incredible, and off the coast of South Africa, the species can jump straight out of the water (a maneuver that Edgley called “polaris”).
“They jump out of the water when they’re hunting seals, so I had to basically see how far I could polaris out of the water using a monofin,” he said. “Training was really weird. I had to completely reinvent my training for this. Did quite well, I thought I did well, and then Alison Towner, the expert in white sharks, said, ‘You’re not bad, Ross, for a naked, shaven ape because that’s what you are, but compared to a shark, whose cartilage is flexible, you have this clumsy skeletal system.'”
After the great white, he moved on to the tiger shark, which has an enormous appetite. The species goes through feast and famine while it patrols the ocean waters, and Edgley wanted to see if he could re-create that in a human body.
“A tiger shark can go miles and miles across oceans but then find something like a whale carcass and chow down, so I basically lost as much weight as I could, then put it on like a famine and feast,” he said. “Ate 40,000 calories in 24 hours, put on 22 pounds. All that was good until I went to the Bahamas with Mike Heithaus and found out that a tiger shark can eat 20,000 calories in a single bite. Humbling.”
Next, Edgley turned to hammerheads and their agility. For this competition, he tried to re-create their ability to turn on a dime, and rather than take to the sea, he took to the sky and attempted to turn around with as many Gs of force as he could muster. Spoiler alert: He vomited his breakfast.
“Again, very humbling,” he said. “The final one was the mako shark, the fastest shark in the world. … Had the idea that we had to [swim in] ocean currents and tides, so we found this amazing compression of tides in Wales just off the coast and tried our very best.”
Each of these experiences not only humbled Edgley but provided him (and now viewers) the chance to appreciate the biological majesty of these often misunderstood creatures.
“It just completely changes your perception on just how amazing they are,” he said. “I think that’s exactly what the show was designed to do. By bringing shark science to a new audience, hopefully we get people to understand how they’ve managed to survive mass extinctions, how they exist in oceans all over the world, and that would be the biggest metric of success if people take that away because there’s a lot of misconceptions around sharks. But if people take away this admiration and respect, then it’ll be a success.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Shark vs. Ross Edgley is part of this year’s SharkFest on Nat Geo. Programs are also available on Nat Geo WILD, Nat Geo Mundo, Disney+, Hulu and ESPN2. Click here for more information.
