(MENAFN- AFP) "People think of me as a yogi who eats tofu, it's mad how they assume freedivers to be," says Guillaume Nery, the star of his sport from the southern French city of Nice.
Far from the stereotypes, Nery has sagely built up a viable economic model which has allowed him to follow his dream and make a living from his sport.
The bronzed and sculpted 33-year-old finishes the plate of spaghetti carbonara of the person sitting alongside him at his table, in the shade of the baking Cote d'Azur sun.
He then sets about debunking other myths that were popularised by The Big Blue, Luc Besson's 1988 film about the friendship and rivalry between two leading freedivers.
Nery refuses to pontificate about environmental issues when he is prepared to fly across the world to go diving in Tahiti, and he recoils at the image of himself as a merman, half-man, half-fish.
"A fish breathes under water. Submarine life, that's not me," he tells AFP as he talks of the "crazy intensity" of diving to a world record depth of -125 metres.
Nery has set the world record four times and was also the world champion in 2011, but despite that he is unable to make a living from his sport so instead he created his own company, known as Blue Nery.
"When I was 14 or 15, I said: 'I want to live the life of Pelizzari, my role model'", he says, referring to Italian freediving great Umberto Pelizzari.
"Today, I live off my image."
Along with his wife Julie Gautier, he has a successful film production company called Les Films Engloutis (Sunken Films).
They made the 2010 film 'Free Fall', in which Nery dives into the world's deepest underwater hole, the 202m Dean's Blue Hole in the Bahamas.
The film has been viewed 22 million times on the internet and his company has an annual turnover of up to 130,000 euros ($141,522; £91,000).
- 'Living the moment' -
The financial autonomy that and his sponsors provide allow him to prepare to win back his title at the world championships in Cyprus on September 16 in the constant weight apnea discipline.
He ceded his world title in 2013 to his friend and rival, the Russian Alexey Molchanov, who has also beaten Nery's world record with a dive of -128 metres.
In the build-up to the competition, he has intensified his preparations and dived -105m in the waters off Nice on July 18.
He spends plenty of time in the gym too, although he insists that freediving is not body-building. Unlike other sports, he says, "we need to maximise our use of energy. A good dive means consuming little oxygen, and yet a huge effort is required to descend and come back up again with fins."
The key is "relaxation, to be almost in a state of hibernation. You need to get in that mindset as soon as you wake up. Sometimes you are almost in a state of idleness."
He says he is at his happiest during three and a half minutes of a dive, especially in a freefall to a depth of more than 30 metres, when "you listen to your own feelings, living the moment. That's where I get my mantra: here and now."
Nery may dismiss the image of himself as yoga-obsessed, but he says freediving can teach people to be at greater peace with themselves.
"It is a type of meditation. This sport makes you feel extremely humble when you are hanging like a molecule of water in the blue enormity," he says.
"Nowhere else in the world can you experience infinity with all five senses."
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