Darby Allin has kickflipped on top of Mount Everest. He’s broken his foot in four places, gotten hit by a bus, and come back for more. So when he casually mentioned nearly drowning during a new interview, it barely registered as a big deal to him. It should to everyone else.
Speaking with 8 News Now Las Vegas ahead of AEW‘s Dynamite and Collision tapings in the city, Allin was asked about his history of close calls. He brought up one that hadn’t been public before: a near-drowning while filming for Discovery’s Shark Week.
“When you said the drowned one, I was filming Shark Week last year, and I was trying to kickflip at the bottom of the ocean with 15 sharks around my head, and then I ran out of oxygen, and I remember almost drowning there. I thought that’s what you were referring to,” Allin said.
This Is Just How He’s Wired
Allin appeared on Discovery’s Shark Week special “Caught! Sharks Strike Back” in the summer of 2025, attempting an underwater kickflip surrounded by sharks as part of the programming. The near-drowning, by his own account, happened when he ran out of air mid-stunt. He walked away and, true to form, kept going: a few months later he was landing a kickflip at 20,958 feet on the way up Mount Everest, a stunt widely reported as the highest-elevation kickflip ever attempted, before reaching the summit days later.
None of this is new behavior for Allin. He’s said before that Jackass helped him find his place in wrestling, and stunts like these track with a career built on doing the thing everyone else would talk themselves out of. Sharks, altitude, oxygen, it barely seems to register as a deterrent.
Why It’s Coming Up Now
Allin brought up the near-drowning almost as an afterthought, in the middle of a wider conversation about AEW’s Las Vegas shows. That’s part of what makes it land: for most people, running out of air at the bottom of the ocean with a school of sharks nearby would be the scariest thing that ever happened to them. For Allin, it’s just one entry on a very long list.
