Since when were freediving courses offered in your country?

[dhkim030203]

Here in Korea (and the Asia region in general), freediving wasn't introduced as a sport until fairly recently.

I think the reason why it hasn't caught on in China is pretty self explanatory. China was very poor until at least the 1990s, so most water sports (including even swimming) was a 'first world luxury' for many Chinese. Taiwan and Korea was a bit better in that regard, but Taiwan had its beaches practically closed off from the public by the government due to concerns of a Chinese invasion, again, until the late 80s and 90s. If shell diver 'schools' (if you can call it that) in Jeju island and parts of Busan are included as 'free-diving', then Korea probably had places to learn freediving since at least 1940, but this is probably a stretch. The modern form of freediving was introduced to Korea at around the early 2000s.

Japan, surprisingly not all that much different. The first Japanese competitive freedivers started competing at around the mid-late 90s.

Southeast Asia might have been slightly better off, but this seems to have been mostly propelled by foreign dive shops coming to the region in the early 00s.

 

[John C. Ratliff]

This, to me, is an interesting statement above by dhkim030203, as China is a powerhouse in the word of Finswimming. Finswimming is one of the sports that the World Underwater Federation (CMA) that also includes free diving.

LATEST

In addition to organizing international underwater sport events it is at the forefront of technical and scientific research and development.

www.cmas.org

One of the events in finswimming is the 50m apnea swim, or 50 meters swimming underwater. Here are the Asian records for the finswimming events:

Records

www.cmas.org

 

[JMBL]

In France, it was around 1990 if my memory serves me well, I'd say 1991, 1992. After the movie "The Big Blue" many people tried free diving on their own, as a hobby, but without proper knowledge and ended up harming themselves. So the FFESSM (Fédération Française d'Etudes et de Sport Sous Marin / French Federation for Underwater Studies and Sports ; CMAS affiliated) created a specific cursus for free diving.

Before that, it was an activity mostly reserved to underwater hunters/fishermen, where you'd learn from a buddy already experienced. Systematic training was limited to competitive underwater hunters.

Lots of water under the bridge...