As Neil Agius approached Għar Lapsi at the end of his mammoth swim around the Maltese archipelago, the ultra-endurance athlete had only one thing on his mind.

Crowds had shown up to greet the 38-year-old swimmer. But Agius was oblivious to it all.

“I could not hear or see anyone, all I was seeing were pallets made up of rubber, all over the place,” he said. 

The sound of the crashing waves drowned out the noise of the crowd apart from the voice of two crew members who, using glow sticks, guided Agius towards a ladder.

Agius completed his world record 142.3km swim in 60 hours and 35 minutes on Monday evening. The World Open Water Swimming Association has now ratified it as a new world record for the longest, unassisted, current-neutral ocean swim ever recorded.

The swimmer recalled the last moments of his world-record swim at a press conference at the Royal Malta Yacht Club on Saturday morning. He was accompanied by his 25 crew members who were gave him support, food and guidance during his three-day swim.

Neil Agius and his partner Lara Vella (right) and his whole team on Saturday morning. Credit: Chris Sant Fournier

They included his partner, Lara Vella, logistic director Gordon Bugeja and David Brookes, who kept tabs on the weather, Neil’s nutrition during the swim and ratifying it for the record books.

Failure provided lessons for a successful swim

Planning for the swim began last year, when the Olympian attempted to cross 160 km from Mallorca to Ibiza. He was forced to abandon that swim after being stung repeatedly by swarms of jellyfish. 

“That failure was very important for this year’s success,” he said. 

“I changed everything. This is the seventh year I’ve been doing these swims, and I’m always tweaking and finding new ways to improve,” he recalled. 

“You can Google ‘how to boil an egg’ but I cannot Google ‘how to swim 160km’ and get a blueprint of what to do. I am trying to create new ideas and new systems to do so. Open-water swimming has become my passion and I want to put Malta on the map for this.”

After months of training, Neil’s team gave him the go-ahead to start his swim last Saturday. Minutes before he walked into the water at Għadira Bay, he took a moment to close his eyes and feel the sand beneath his feet.

“You can’t believe the day has finally come after a lifetime of preparation,” he said. 

“So many days of sacrifice, of grinding and doing things I didn’t want to do. I didn’t want to wake up every day to do all that training.  I closed my eyes and I knew, it was go time.”

Neil was checked by paramedics on Monday evening in Għar Lapsi after swimming for over 60 hours. Credit: Jonathan Borg

For his swim to be ratified as a world record one, he could not touch the rib or any of his crew members at any point.

Every 30 minutes, he would take a 90 second break.

“I need to eat, I need to drink, and rinse my mouth with mouthwash to reduce the inflammation,” he recalled of those pauses. 

“I also have to try and pee and any communication with the team has to be done during this time. People cannot all talk to me at once, as I need to keep a high level of concentration and this could distort me.”

Neil shot down suggestions that swimming around the Maltese islands was easier than swimming across countries. 

“It’s actually much worse, swimming closer to the land the sea is shallower and at night you begin to see the stones underneath form different shadows,” he said. “Then you start to think that’s not a stone, but something else!”

Fears of hypothermia

Neil and his crew tried to prepare for every scenario. But they were caught by surprise when he started feeling cold at 9.30pm on the first night. He still had an entire night ahead of him.

 “He was chattering his teeth, and I was surprised to see this,” his partner, Lara Vella, said.

Agius’ swims usually take place in June. He shifted this year’s event to September to minimise the risk of jellyfish disrupting it.

“But this meant colder nights, of course,” Vella said.

By the second night, the crew were more prepared. 

“We doubled up on motivators on the boat to make sure the energy throughout the evening was high and we kept Neil in good spirits,” Lara recalled. 

Neil also was taken aback by how cold the evenings were. There were moments he was worried his doctor would make him stop the swim because he was hypothermic.

“I was breathing in cold air, and I could feel the cold go down to my stomach. I was cold inside and out.”

He began to worry about how the cold would impact him on the second night, when he would be up for over 30 hours swimming.

Neil Agius climbs the ladder at Għar Lapsi to end his swim. Photo: Jonathan Borg

His concerns were that the cold would worsen his hallucinations. 

“During all this time in the water, my mind is focused on the position of my shoulder and stroke, how my hips are moving, making sure my mouth doesn’t open so much so I don’t swallow so much water.”

Yet, the night also brought beautiful moments. 

"It’s pitch black, but the moon was so bright and it gave me so much strength, energy and power to move forward.”

Talk of changing route midway

While Neil was battling the waves, his crew faced their own challenge: an incoming storm.

As the storm approached, Agius’ logistics director suggested modifying his route to avoid the worst of it. He wanted Agius to swim around Gozo twice and finish in Sliema instead.

“I put my head back in the water and cried,” Agius recalled when his team raised the idea.

The route was approved two months before, and Neil was set to not change anything.

“If we changed the route we would give the message out there that we took the easy way out, and we didn’t want to do that. We worked too hard for too long to not get what we deserved,” he said.

Agius and his crew discussed the oncoming storm during one of his short breaks. They decided to go ahead with the route as originally planned.

When the storm came, it brought significant challenges with it.

“The waves were as large as a door frame,” Melaine Vella, one of the land team members, said.

But Agius, under the watchful eye of his crew, battled through it.

There were also concerns about where Agius would end his swim.

The topography of Malta’s southern coast meant that if he did not stop at Għar Lapsi, he would have to swim another 16km to Golden Bay.

There was another concern.

“I was told that if we kept swimming, I would not have any more warm food and drinks,” Agius said. “So I decided it would be best to end the swim at Għar Lapsi.”

What’s next for Neil Agius? 

Agius does not plan on calling it quits just yet. There are other big challenges he wants to tackle, he said. But in the short term, his focus will now switch to opening a yoga and Kaizen hub with his partner, Lara. The hub will provide yoga sessions and breathing workshops where Agius will share all he has learnt to hit peak performance.

Kaizen is a Japanese concept focused on continuous improvement.

“To navigate through rough seas, I had to train and learn what it meant to experience rough times, and that is what we want to provide at our hub,” he said.