A crocodile crushed his only functional arm. He returned to the to water to fight plastic pollution

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The water was calm that morning in the Okavango Delta, in Botswana. Belgian diver Alain Brandeleer remembers the visibility was good and that he felt no particular unease. He had spent much of his life seeking ever more extreme experiences in the water, swimming with sharks in different parts of the world — even with great whites, without a cage. Over time, the constant exposure to risk had stopped giving him an adrenaline rush. And when that happens, he said, a question appears that’s hard to ignore: what comes next?

That day, September 6, 2012, the answer was brutal. The water turned cloudy and thick. Visibility disappeared in a matter of seconds. He felt something brush against his legs, but didn’t fully register what it was at first. Then he understood. The body of a crocodile was wrapped around him, and it was biting his right arm.

One of his companions managed to hold him by the oxygen tank for more than a minute. Brandeleer would later say that saved his life.

“If he had let go for a second, I was dead,” he said.

After the attack came the wait. Hours passed before medics could attend to him, get him onto a helicopter and transfer him to a hospital in Johannesburg. During that time he didn’t even know for certain whether he still had his arm.

“I could feel the arm, but I didn’t know if it was there or not,” he recalled. The wetsuit was holding it in place.

When the doctors assessed Brandeleer they decided the arm had to be amputated.

It was a devastating blow. Brandeleer was born with an atrophy of his left hand. From a young age he had learned to live with that physical difference and to resist it defining him. The arm that had just been destroyed was his only fully functional one.

Over the years, water became the place where he could prove himself. First as a diver, then as a long-distance swimmer, he found in the sea a form of freedom. In the water he managed to push his own limits and realize that, in his case, those limits were often more mental than physical.

That’s why, when the doctors raised the option of amputation, his response was immediate. He recalls telling the doctor, with a calm that still surprises him today, that if that was the only option, he would rather not wake up from the anaesthesia.

Along with his quality of life, he was concerned about becoming a burden. For years he had supported his father — emotionally and financially — at a time when his health had deteriorated badly. That experience left a mark on him. “I promised myself I would never put my son in that situation,” he explained.

Trying to save the arm carried a very high probability of death by infection but faced with Brandeleer’s stubbornness, surgeons decided to try.

He survived, but his recovery was not straightforward. There were surgeries, complications and infections that tested his physical and mental resilience.

Returning to the water

But six months after the attack, he went back into the water.

He started with basic, almost exploratory movements, accompanied by a physiotherapist, as part of his rehabilitation. More than a sporting goal, it was a way of recovering a relationship with his own body.

Over time, he began to train several times a day. He adjusted movements. He tried, got frustrated, then tried again. Then, he told his physiotherapist he wanted to swim the English Channel. He didn’t do it, but the idea marked a shift. A year later, after several setbacks — including another injury and an infection — he set a goal to swim the Strait of Gibraltar.

He crossed the 8-mile passage 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 to come to terms with what had happened to him.

Impossible to ignore: plastic pollution

In parallel, the sea began to occupy another place in his life. On his trips through the Red Sea, the Mediterranean and other remote spots, Brandeleer began to notice that even in places that seemed pristine at first, plastic waste piled up on beaches, floated in the water and mixed with the wildlife.

“You arrive at a place that looks like paradise, you walk a few meters, and it’s full of plastic,” he said.

The image of turtles mistaking bags for jellyfish stayed with him. So did the contrast between dive sites he had known decades earlier, full of color and life, and their current state, degraded and polluted. That change shook him. It convinced him that those wonders could be lost in a single generation.

It was Brandeleer’s son who told him about The Ocean Cleanup, an organization that intercepts plastic before it reaches the ocean.

He decided to start with something simple: swimming to raise funds.

In 2025, Brandeleer swam between the Spanish islands of Ibiza and Formentera, a journey of about 23 kilometers in open water. The initiative raised around 24,000 euros ($28,000) — roughly the cost of intercepting 500,000 plastic bottles before they reached the ocean. Beyond the figure, what interested him was the idea that one person’s small action could have a measurable impact.

Brandeleer wanted to inspire others and show the possibilities of collective action.

His “Running for the Ocean” initiative takes the same idea to dry land. It’s a 20-kilometer (12.4 mile) race in Brussels, with more than 250 participants raising funds to help intercept 1 million plastic bottles. It’s not about performance, but about participation — and, above all, replicability. The intention is for the model to be transferable to other cities and grow internationally.

Today, more than a decade after the attack, the pain is still there. Not constantly, but enough to remind Brandeleer that his body will never be the same. For a while, he tried to resist it, avoid it, ignore it. With time, he changed the way he related to the sensation.

“If you see it as an enemy, it always wins,” he said.

He prefers to think of it as part of his life, something he coexists with. In the same way he lives with the memory of the accident, with the story of having been born with an atrophied hand, and with the certainty that much of his character was formed around that difference.

When he talks about everything that came afterwards, he doesn’t frame it as a comeback story. There is no clear moment when everything gets better. Rather, he describes a series of transformations — some sought, others not — that gradually gave shape to something different. He talks about his father. About his son. About the children born with physical differences whom he also wants to reach when he swims. “I want to show them that with passion and perseverance, you can achieve the unthinkable,” he said.

Thirteen years ago, in the murky waters of Botswana, Alain Brandeleer lost control of his body inside the jaws of a crocodile.

Today, when he goes into the sea, it’s different. His movement is more conscious, more measured. There is no longer any need to try anything. What there is, instead, is a different way of being there: the conviction that even a life marked from birth by difference, shaped by pain and fear, can still push for something larger than itself.

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