British diver and Thai youth athlete he rescued from cave in 2018 reunite

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A British diver who helped rescue 12 members of a Thai youth soccer team who became trapped in a cave in 2018 has rejoiced after getting to personally watch one of the players graduate from a prestigious high school in New York.

Rick Stanton – the diver who had a hand in saving the Wild Boars soccer squad whose entrapment of more than two weeks landed in news headlines across the world – got to reunite with one of the rescued children, Adul Samon, when Samon graduated in mid-June from the Masters School college preparatory outside New York City, according to the institution as well as ABC News.

At the request of the school, Stanton delivered the commencement address to the graduating class, ABC’s recent report added. And Stanton was on stage when Samon, who played soccer for the Master School’s team, received his diploma.

“I’m very proud of the fact that I was partly responsible for his – you know – his life, in a way,” Stanton said of Samon, according to ABC. “And to see him make the most of the opportunities he’s had.”

Samon said it was “just incredible” that Stanton’s intervention, as he and his Wild Boars teammates fought for their lives five years earlier, had afforded him the opportunity to graduate from prep school and gain admission into Vermont’s Middlebury College.

“It is this miracle,” Samon said. “I never thought I would come this far and I would be sitting here in the United States.”

The Wild Boars and their coach had taken what they planned to be a 1-hour trip to the Tham Luang Nang Non cave in northern Thailand after practice on 23 June 2018.

Because they expected the excursion to be so short, the team didn’t bring any food or water. But their outing became much longer when heavy rainfall associated with Thailand’s summer monsoon season inundated and blocked the path out of the cave.

The team spent more than a week subsisting on “trickles of freshwater and the hope of making it out of the cave alive”, as the ABC report put it. The coach and the players tried to dig their way out of the tunnel using their bare hands while thousands of people from around the globe arrived to search for the group.

Stanton, a firefighter from Coventry who has earned a reputation as one of Britain’s top cave divers, was among those who went to the cave. He soon led a team which went on a mission to go inside the cave to explore it for signs of the Wild Boars.

The mission spearheaded by Stanton ultimately found the Wild Boars huddled together on a small ledge in a chamber of the vast cave system on 2 July 2018. Stanton and his colleagues gave medicine as well as foil blankets to the Wild Boars – and then led them to the surface over a three-day period culminating on 10 July 2018.

People across the world marveled at the successful rescue mission, which was so perilous that an elite Thai diver at one point died from a lack of air as he worked to provide oxygen tanks to the Wild Boars after they were found but before they were shepherded out.

In the aftermath, many learned that Samon was one of the few boys on the Wild Boars who could speak English. Teammates also recounted how he emerged as a leader among them in the days that their fates hung in the balance.

Samon later received a full scholarship from the Masters School to study there and he became the captain of its soccer team.

According to ABC, the head of the Masters School, Laura Danforth, said it was an easy decision for her institution to recruit Samon.

“What I heard about his work ethic – and who he was in the cave, and who he was before the cave and after, I knew that he was going to be just fine here,” Danforth said to ABC.

Samon said his experiences during and after the Wild Boars’ cave ordeal had taught him that “we have to keep adjusting to the environment where you are in order to survive”.

“You have to keep adapting your life,” he told ABC.