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The Plunge (2014)

Shavarsh Karapetyan trained his eyes on the asphalt as he rounded the corner. He had 45 pounds of sand strapped to his back, facing the final push on a 13-mile run fueled by the fury he’d been nursing ever since Soviet coaches dropped him from the national swim team.

Karapetyan was raised in a one-story house in Kirovakan, a northern Armenian city now called Vanadzor, where his father, Vladimir, was determined to make athletes out of Shavarsh and his younger brothers Kamo and Anatoly. According to a classified report by the Armenian Communist Party, which the Yerevan news agency Mediamax obtained from Soviet-era archives and provided to Grantland, 46 people died while 20 others were saved and received medical attention. “Their ideological rationale was that a Soviet trolleybus could not fall in the water,” explained Pushkin Serobyan, a former Armenian sports official who worked for the Yerevan city prosecutor’s office at the time of the accident.

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