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That morning, the water in Botswana’s Okavango Delta was calm. Belgian diver Alain Branddeler remembers that visibility was good and he didn’t feel particularly anxious. He spent much of his life seeking ever more extreme underwater experiences, swimming with sharks and even cage-free great whites in various parts of the world. Over time, constant exposure to risk stopped giving me an adrenaline rush. And when that happens, he said, an impossible question emerges: What happens next?
On that day, September 6, 2012, the answer was brutal. The water became cloudy and thick. My vision disappeared in just a few seconds. He felt something touch his leg, but at first he wasn’t entirely sure what it was. Then he understood. The crocodile’s body wrapped around him and bit his right arm.
One of his comrades managed to hold him for more than a minute by the oxygen tank. Brandederia later said it saved his life.
“If he had let go at all, I would have died,” he said.
After the attack came the wait. Hours passed before doctors treated him and loaded him into a helicopter to take him to a hospital in Johannesburg. During that time, he wasn’t even sure if his arm was still there.
“I could feel my arm, but I didn’t know if it was there,” he recalled. The wetsuit held it in place.
Doctors examined Brandelier and determined that his arm would need to be amputated.
It was a devastating blow. Delia Brando was born with a withered left hand. From an early age, he learned to live with his physical differences and resist letting them define him. The arm that had just been destroyed was the only fully functional arm.
Over the years, water became a place where he could prove himself. First as a diver and then as a long-distance swimmer, he found a form of freedom in the ocean. While in the water he succeeded in pushing his limits, he found that in his case those limits were often more mental than physical.
That’s why when doctors brought up the option of amputation, his reaction was immediate. He still remembers telling the doctor, with remarkable calm, that he should not wake up from the anesthesia if that was his only option.
He was concerned about the burden as well as his quality of life. For years, he supported his father both emotionally and financially as his father’s health deteriorated. The experience left a big mark on him. “I swore to myself that I would never put my son in that situation,” he explained.
Attempting to save the arm would have very likely resulted in death from infection, but faced with Brandelier’s stubbornness, the surgeons decided to try.
He survived, but his recovery was not easy. There were surgeries, complications and infections that tested his physical and mental resilience.
But six months after the attack, he was back in the water.
As part of his rehabilitation, he began with basic, almost exploratory movements under the supervision of a physical therapist. It wasn’t so much a sport as a means to reconnect with my body.
Over time, he started training several times a day. He adjusted his movements. He tried, failed, and tried again. Then he told his physiotherapist he wanted to swim the English Channel. Although he didn’t do it, the idea made a difference. A year later, after several setbacks, including further injuries and infections, he set his sights on swimming the Strait of Gibraltar.
He traversed the 8-mile corridor 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 of coming to terms with what had happened to him.
In parallel, the sea began to occupy another place in his life. As she traveled to the Red Sea, the Mediterranean, and other remote locations, Branddelier began to notice that even in seemingly clean places, plastic waste was piling up on beaches, floating in the water, and mingling with wildlife.
“I arrived at this paradise, walked a few meters, and it was full of plastic,” he says.
The image of the turtle mistaking the bag for a jellyfish stuck with him. So too was the contrast between the colorful and vibrant dive spot he knew decades ago and its current degraded and polluted state. The change shocked him. It convinced him that those wonders could be lost in a generation.
Branddelia’s son told her about Ocean Cleanup, an organization that collects plastic before it ends up in the ocean.
He decided to start with something simple: raising money through swimming.
In 2025, Branddelaire swam between the Spanish islands of Ibiza and Formentera, traveling approximately 23 kilometers in open sea. The initiative raised approximately 24,000 euros ($28,000). This is roughly the cost of stopping 500,000 plastic bottles before they reach the ocean. Beyond this number, what interested him was the idea that one person’s small actions could have a measurable impact.
Branddelia wanted to inspire others and show them the possibilities of collective action.
His “Running for the Ocean” initiative takes the same idea to land. The race is a 20-kilometre (12.4-mile) race in Brussels with more than 250 participants raising money to collect one million plastic bottles. It’s not performance that matters, but participation and, above all, reproducibility. The aim is to transfer this model to other cities and grow internationally.
More than a decade after the attack, the pain still lingers. Not always, but enough to remind Brando Delia that her body will never be the same. For a while he tried to resist it, avoid it, ignore it. Over time, he changed the way he related to that feeling.
“If you treat them as your enemy, you will always win,” he said.
He prefers to think of it as part of his life, something that coexists. Similarly, he lives with the memory of the accident, the story of being born with a withered hand, and the conviction that much of his personality was formed around that difference.
When he talks about everything that followed, he doesn’t frame it as a comeback story. There is no clear moment when everything turns around. Rather, he describes a series of changes (some desired, some uncalled for) that gradually give form to something different. he talks about his father. About his son. Through swimming, he also wants to reach out to children born with physical differences. “I want to show them that with passion and perseverance, you can achieve the unthinkable,” he said.
Thirteen years ago, Alan Branddeler lost control of his body in the jaws of a crocodile in the murky waters of Botswana.
Today, when he goes into the water, things are different. His movements are more conscious, more deliberate. There’s no need to try anything else. Instead, what is there is a different way of being. It is the conviction that even in a life marked from birth by difference and shaped by pain and fear, we can still move forward in search of something greater than ourselves.
