The University of Bristol presented British rescue drivers John Volathen and Rick Stanton with honorary degrees for saving 13 people.Â
By Akansha Gupta
10/07/2022
Two British rescue divers were rewarded for heroically rescuing 12 young football players and their assistant football coach stranded due to Thailand’s flooded cave system in July 2018.Â
After four years of the daring and highly broadcasted rescue operation, the two British cave rescue divers have been awarded honorary degrees by the University of Bristol.Â
The Thai Government called in John Volathen and Rick Stanton to carry out the operation after heavy rains trapped the Moo Paa (Wild Boars) junior football team and Ekaphol Chantawong, their 25-year-old assistant coach, in a cave complex in the north of the country near Chiang Rai.
John and Rick lead a team of 5000 members to make this rescue operation successful. The two British pairs, with their team, had to navigate 2.5 km of narrow and compressed underwater passageways in absolute pitch blackness against the violent and unrestrained current.
Cave diving is viewed as the most dangerous of all extreme adventurous sports among the other underwater sports. John claimed that there was scepticism in carrying all the 12 boys, whose ages range from eleven to sixteen, back to the safe land considering the present hazards in the cave.
The team took about nine days to find the junior football team and their coach. Due to the lack of manuals, it took another eight days to rescue the 13 trapped people. Each boy was accompanied by two rescue divers, and it took 11 hours to navigate the way out of the cave.
The boys were injected with anaesthetic ketamine and anti-anxiety drugs like Xanax and atropine to slow their heart rate before hauling them out of the submerged cave. John was 47, and Rick was 57 at the time of the operation.
Linda Wilson, Vice-President of the University of Bristol’s Spaelogical society, nominated the two great men for honorary degrees.
To reward the two courageous Thai cave rescue divers for managing to pull off quite an impossible mission and bringing everybody back alive, the University of Bristol presented both with the honorary degree during the summer graduation ceremony on Wednesday.
This operation sparked a movie adaptation called, Thirteen Lives starring Colin Farrell and Tom Bateman. The Hollywood movie is set to release in November 2022.
