A Swedish Olympian has defended swimming in the Cadiz floods after footage of him went viral and sparked a backlash online.
Lars Walker, 63, told the Spanish Eye that the whole situation was ‘taken out of context’ and ‘dramatised’ – insisting that he never needed nor ‘asked to be rescued’.
He also feels it was unfair for the mayor to brand him ‘irresponsible’ while watching a clipped version of the video for the first time, ‘without understanding the full situation’.
Lars is incredibly fit, having formed part of Sweden’s Olympic kayaking team in the 1980s, before winning multiple national championships.
He has never given up the sport and has been swimming in extremely tough rivers for decades as part of his training.
At 50, he even trained as a firefighter in his home country and passed the fitness test with flying colours.
‘I don’t think I’ve done anything wrong,’ Lars told this newspaper, ‘If they let common sense rein at all, most people would have done the same.’
The drama began last Friday when Lars was filmed by Canal Sur swimming across the swollen Guadalete River in Jerez de la Frontera to reach his flooded business.
The well-known local entrepreneur runs Puerto de Jerez, offering canoe and kayak trips on the river.
His apartment is on the second floor of the building, which he said was not at risk of being flooded at the time.
That’s partly why Lars decided to stay at the premises, located in La Corta, a low-lying rural neighbourhood, despite warnings about the river’s flow rising.
He also had thousands of euros worth of equipment, kayaks, and water platforms all tied up with ropes, which he wanted to keep an eye on and adjust accordingly during the freak weather event.
By Wednesday, the river had risen by a noticeable amount, and Lars says he was contacted by a police officer about his two cars that were parked by a restaurant on the nearby A-2002.
‘I asked him if I needed to move the cars and he said no, they are not at risk,’ Lars said.
‘But by Thursday, the river rose even more and I asked if I could just take my keys and drop them to my friends so they could move the vehicles, but he told me that I couldn’t leave my own property.’
However, Lars did not want to lose the two cars when he knew he could easily make the journey to the road on a kayak.
He explained: ‘On Friday, it kept rising, and it came into the bottom floor of my building, so I put on my triathlon wetsuit and took a kayak out to give my friends the keys to the cars.’
However, on his way back, Lars said he ‘made a mistake’ and fell out of the kayak, which was dragged away by the current before getting stuck on a wooden fence.
He decided to swim the remaining 150 metres to his home, using his years of experience to navigate the stream – as a policeman ‘screamed’ at him to get out of the water.
‘People were saying I was so lucky to have found the branches to hold onto, but of course that was the closest branch to my house and it was all intentional,’ he said.
After reaching his home, he began tying down an expensive water pumping machine, when suddenly the police threw a rescue boat into the water.
Lars recalled: ‘They came with four guys to save me, but I never asked nor needed to be rescued, I was going to go and watch TV upstairs with my dogs.
‘They told me I had to get into the boat with them, but I told them not without my dogs, so I had to get them out and onto the boat, which was not nice for them.’
He added: ‘I know what I am capable of, I do winter swimming training and I was swimming over what is usually just a tomato field… the average Mr Smith may have struggled but that’s not me.
‘You must let people have some autonomy. It’s very strange to me when people are treated like idiots… you need to trust people to make their own judgements.’
Lars said many local people feel the Junta de Andalucia has been overly cautious in its evacuation response – which has seen around 15,000 people ordered to leave their homes – over fears of repeating the failures of the DANA disaster in Valencia.
That crisis left hundreds dead and continues to be a PR nightmare for the Partido Popular, which rules Valencia as well as Andalucia.
‘I’m quite concerned by this rising level of government authority in Europe,’ Lars added, ‘we saw it in Covid when they locked us all down and did not even let us go outside or hiking for months and months.’
Lars said the story was later sensationalised and that the whole saga was ‘completely unnecessary.’
‘I think some more common sense needs to be applied,’ he added.
Lars was filmed live by Canal Sur TV’s programme Hoy en Dia as he entered the river.
At the time, the Guadalete was running at more than 6.80 metres – just centimetres below its historical record – with a flow rate exceeding 1,180 cubic metres per second, according to regional monitoring data.
Officers managed to evacuate Lars and his pets safely. Once back on dry land, Lars confirmed to the Spanish Eye, he was not arrested nor handed a fine.
Jerez mayor Maria Jose Garcia-Pelayo publicly criticised the incident, calling it ‘incredible’ and ‘deeply irresponsible’.
‘This isn’t just about putting your own life at risk,’ she said in a video message.
‘It’s also about endangering the lives of the people who have to rescue you. This is exactly what must never be done.’
Read more Andalucia news at the Spanish Eye.
