Guillaume Néry

Why organisations work with Guillaume Nery

• He has held four constant weight freediving world records and won the AIDA individual world title in 2011, so the performance authority is earned in a discipline where a lapse in attention has physical consequences.
• His material on breath work is specific and practical, not metaphorical: audiences leave with techniques he uses himself before a dive to -125 metres.
• He speaks from the full arc of elite performance, including a career-ending accident in 2015 that forced a public reinvention as a filmmaker and storyteller.
• His underwater films with Julie Gautier, including Free Fall and One Breath Around the World, have reached tens of millions of viewers and give his talks a visual language most sport speakers do not have.
• He is a TED main-stage speaker, which most corporate audiences recognise as a filter for delivery quality before the first slide.

Biography highlights

• Four-time AIDA constant weight world record holder, with a personal best of -126m set in Cyprus in 2015.
• AIDA Individual World Champion, Kalamata, 2011, with a -117m dive.
• AIDA Team World Champion with the French national freediving team.
• TED main-stage speaker, “The exhilarating peace of freediving”, 2015.
• Co-director, with Julie Gautier, of Free Fall, Narcose and One Breath Around the World.
• Profiled by National Geographic, CNN and South China Morning Post Style.

Biography

A freediver on a single breath has no second chance to reset. The dive is planned on the surface, executed in silence, and any break in focus on the way down or up carries a real physical cost. Guillaume Nery spent more than a decade operating in that environment at world-championship level.

He set his first constant weight world record at 19 and went on to break it three more times, reaching a personal best of -126m in Cyprus. In 2011, in Kalamata, he won the AIDA individual world title on a -117m dive. With the French national team, he added a team world championship.

The ending was not clean. At the 2015 world championships in Cyprus the dive line was mis-set, sending him to -139m instead of the planned -129m. He blacked out near the surface, suffered a lung barotrauma and retired from competition. That break point is now part of the talk, not a footnote to it.

Since retiring he has worked as a filmmaker with Julie Gautier, producing Free Fall at Dean’s Blue Hole, Narcose and One Breath Around the World. His TED talk on freediving has reached a wide corporate audience. The material he brings to a keynote is grounded in what he actually does before a deep dive: breath work, attention control, and the discipline of staying calm when the margin for error is small.

Key speaking topics

• Breath work and physiological self-regulation
• Performance under extreme pressure
• Attention and composure in high-stakes moments
• Recovery and reinvention after a career-defining setback
• Elite sport psychology applied to business
• Visual storytelling and ocean exploration

Ideal for

• Leadership offsites focused on composure and decision quality under pressure
• Wellbeing, resilience and peak-performance programmes for senior teams
• Sales, trading and operations groups whose work involves sustained concentration in high-stakes windows
• Conference main-stage slots that need a visually strong, narrative keynote

Audience outcomes

• A working understanding of how breath directly changes physiological and cognitive state.
• Specific techniques the speaker uses himself to prepare for extreme performance, translated to a meeting-room context.
• A reframed view of setbacks, drawn from a public career-ending accident and the reinvention that followed.
• A visual reference point, from the underwater films, that audiences remember and repeat.