Cave Divers Who Saved the Thai Soccer Team Stars of New NatGeo Documentary

In the summer of 2018, the world was captivated by the story of 12 Thai soccer players and their coach who became trapped in a cave due to an early monsoon flood. Now, a new National Geographic documentary tells the harrowing story from the perspective of the cave divers who rescued the team.

Filmmaker Kevin Macdonald started working on the documentary, "The Rescue," a year after the boys were saved. When he dropped out of the project to pursue a separate film, he gave the reins to husband-and-wife filmmakers Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, who had recently won an Academy Award for their National Geographic documentary “Free Solo.”

Partly because Netflix owns the rights to the soccer players’ stories, the documentary focuses on the divers who made the rescue possible: Rick Stanton and John Volanthen of the UK, and Dr. Richard “Harry” Harris of Australia.

Chin, an accomplished rock climber, tells the Los Angeles Times he felt a kinship with the men over their dangerous disciplines.

“Big wall, high-altitude climbing only draws pretty specific people and personality types, and so does cave diving because it’s a specific discipline with such high stakes,” he says. “The problem-solving, the ingenuity required, the amount of risk assessment — those aspects make it really appealing to a certain mindset. You have to make perfect calculations because if you don’t, you die.”

Volunteers Stanton and Volanthen had been diving together and participating in search and recovery dives for decades, while Harris, an anesthesiologist, was asked to provide expertise on sedatives to give the soccer players before they were carried out.

The three divers had to swim over a mile in complete darkness to complete the rescue — and didn’t know, going into it, whether they’d find 13 dead bodies instead of living people in need of help. This is a feat few would be brave enough to attempt, which says something not only about the volunteers themselves, but about cave divers in general.

“Most people, including very expert divers, do not go out of their way to immerse themselves in small, dark tunnels with no visibility and kind of enjoy that feeling of problem-solving and groveling around in the dark to work out where you’re going,” Harris tells the Times. “That’s challenging and usually enjoyable for us.

A team of Thai Navy SEALS initially, however they lacked the expertise and training to be effective in the cave environment, which is when the men stepped in.

“It seems to me it’s the right thing to do to offer help to your community when someone is in need,” Volanthen tells The Times. “I think this was a very specific technical problem which we knew we were very well suited to. I felt very strongly — and I appreciate this sounds arrogant — we knew we had a set of expertise that was perhaps uncommon and that we felt we could make a difference.”

Hear their full story in “The Rescue,” in theaters nationwide now and streaming on Disney+ in December.