Ice-Kicks and Chill: Taking the Plunge at the World Winter Swimming Championships

The World Winter Swimming Championships may not be the best-known extreme sports event of the year, but it's a democratic one, open not just to a qualified elite but anyone foolish enough to trek halfway across Russia for a few minutes of icy glory and exhilaration. The championships are biennial, staged somewhere suitably chilly: Finland held the first five, then it was the turn of Tooting Bec Lido in South London. This year's were the first to be held in Russia, running from 8–12 March, and coincided with the Maslenitsa holiday, which supposedly marks the beginning of spring.

Not in Siberia it didn't.

The city of Tyumen was awarded the championships two years ago, "just before it all kicked off in Crimea" as one British official remembered. The location has form with such events, having recently hosted the Tyumen Open Cup – a smaller and even colder swimming competition – and the European Winter Biathlon Championships.

Founded by plundering Cossacks unleashed by Ivan the Terrible, Tyumen has the energy of a frontier town. The oldest city in Siberia and the centre of the Russian oil industry, it is dominated by corporations such as Lukoil. Their gleaming tower blocks stand alongside pastel-hued classical stucco mansions, and ornately carved traditional wooden houses that subside into the melting permafrost. The city has the world's biggest Toyota dealership, and black SUVs prowl its wide avenues while the snowy taiga stretches beyond. But a colossal Lenin still commands the main square, and it was to Tyumen that his embalmed corpse was sent for safekeeping during World War II. Another monument commemorates the city's cats, sent to relieve rat infestation in the Siege of Leningrad, where they were more likely devoured by that city's starving human population.

Despite the alarming news of unprecedentedly high temperatures in the Arctic this year, the river Tura was frozen solid and the air under sunny blue skies wavered around a respectable five degrees below zero. The river bisects the city in a dramatic sweeping arc, its eastern side an imposing promenade embankment as Siberia rises ever onward. Beneath the Lovers' Bridge, inevitably accessorised by romantic padlocks, a 10-lane, 25 metre-squared pool was chainsawed out of the ice, leaving 350 tons of what looked like giant sugar cubes scattered across the snow. Water pumped continuously into the pool prevented it from freezing over again, while chunks of ice were skimmed off the surface with fishing nets. Not that the frisson of danger was entirely eliminated: veteran Australian swimming coach Ellery McGowan lacerated her hands on the ice and had to compete in bandages – going on nevertheless to win four medals – while another competitor picked up a stomach bug by gulping the less-than-pristine river water and had to bow out prematurely.

After an opening ceremony at the Philharmonic Hall where, in a rollicking kitsch fantasia, troupes of Broadway hoofers and dancing children stomped and whirled across a stage festooned with flags, the Tura embankment and the towering span of the bridge were thronged with crowds for the rest of the week, cheering on swimmers whose ages ranged from eight to 91. Stalls selling pirozhki pasties and pelmeni dumplings alternated with others peddling trinkets carved from Mammoth ivory, while in the competitors' enclosure happy swimmers thawed out in hot tubs and ducked in and out of pop-up saunas; the changing tent bore a sign wishing competitors the inevitable "Welcome to Hell."

The Russians have a bad reputation from previous championships – jump starts, keeping rivals shivering in the water as they get ready, an arsenal of dirty tricks – but this time the hosts, three-quarters of the participants, behaved themselves. Security was tight, with plenty of checkpoints and metal detectors, and the races, expertly staffed by cheerful young volunteers, ran with a brisk efficiency. This prevented any hesitation before the ordeal to come, an escalating set of challenges as the week progressed, from 25 to 450 metres in heats (perhaps not the right word in this case) grouped by age.

The winter swimming community – an international camaraderie of athletic prodigies and endorphin junkies – is one where physical bulk is an asset, the only permitted form of insulation. As the week wore on, hulking Slavs clanked about festooned with medals, but the 20 Brits punched above their weight. A haul of 13 medals placed the UK fourth overall, after Russia, Finland and Estonia. 62-year-old Jackie Cobell – holder of the record for the longest ever Channel swim at 28 hours – carried off a pair of gold medals and was bemused to find herself abducted to a local TV station to participate in a demonstration of Siberian weaving: "I'm a celebrity here!"

14 year-old Will Luckhurst won a bronze, competing with his brother Alan and father John on an unorthodox family holiday; all, like myself, are members of the Serpentine Swimming Club in London. Lorenzo D'Aguilar, a personal trainer from Salford and the first competitor ever to represent Jamaica, was the crowd's favourite. Lorenzo and lawyer friend Joseph Kotrie-Monson – who trains with him by leaping illegally into the grim waters of Salford Quays and, when not swimming, burns off adrenaline by lashing round the Nürburgring race circuit – embody the true swashbuckling spirit of this thrillseeking sport.

From this epicentre a frenzy of international partying spun out across the city, whose bars and restaurants – which include the retro-themed USSR Café and the gaudy Italian Caffe Berlusconi – were stuffed with celebrating and carbo-loading swimmers. One evening saw a bacchanal in the sulphurous waters of the local hot springs, a circle of Dante's inferno reserved for winter swimmers, cavorting in a steaming 40-degree pool while MCs dressed as medieval jesters bellowed their encouragement over banging techno. The chief concern here, after all the sweat and exertion, was expressed by Briton John Coningham-Rolls: "I hope I haven't lost any weight!"

The marathon of winter swimming may be a mere 450 metres, but in these conditions it deserves its name, 'the endurance swim'. All participants had their blood pressure taken the morning of the event and were advised against drinking alchohol the night before – a big ask in this setting. Having come all that way and in the selfless interests of reportage, I entered with great trepidation.

"Get in the water!"

With that barked order, my rivals and I – grizzled Russians to a man ­– kicked off 18 lengths of pain. Breathing is a struggle; swimming when the water wants to kill you is a battle for survival. My hands soon froze into claws but somehow after seven minutes I made it, was hauled out of the river and slung into a sauna where nurses in swimsuits (a scientifically proven treatment) wrapped me in hot towels until the convulsive shivering had subsided. Dazed and oblivious as I had been, it was a great surprise to hear myself called to the podium at the end of the day as the silver medallist in my age group, just after Chill Swim supremo Colin Hill had won the silver in his. Two hours after the race, my normal body temperature just about restored, I looked down at the water – and wanted to get in again.

These championships were also the last in the Winter Swimming World Cup series, five events over the past few months, including the Big Chill Swim in Lake Windermere and others in Sweden, Latvia and Estonia. The overall winners, announced on the final night, were Jaimie Monahan, an extraordinary American woman who last year swam the 70km across Lake Geneva; and the German Christof Wandratsch, who 10 years ago held the record for the fastest English Channel swim (just over seven hours). It was also announced that the next championships, in 2018, will be held in Tallin, Estonia.

The closing ceremony included a talent show, allowing some of the competitors to shine out of the water. Highlights included pyrotechnic jugglers accompanied by thunderous patriotic metal (think Rammstein without the irony); a troupe of Belgian clowns; and in a tribute to the host nation's support for ambiguous sexuality, the Little Swans of Yekaterinburg, a corps de ballet of strapping Siberian drag queens.

But there was one hero who was never mentioned until this culminating moment. Support for Vladimir Putin in this Russian heartland is pervasive. I arrived in Tyumen on International Women's Day, a public holiday in Russia, and when I put it to Irina, a local lawyer, that a woman president would be good for Russia she exclaimed: "Oh no, Russia is such a big country and so difficult to run, it needs a man!" At the merchandise stalls, run by the military clothing company Voentorg, T-shirts were prominently displayed with an ever-so-butch Putin in leathers and shades and the Russian army logo. Finally, at the closing ceremony chief organiser Alexei Salmin, also a deputy for the ruling United Russia party, roared: "I thank God that I was born in Russia! And that our president has made Russia great again and made the lives of its people better!"

But would that great leader and macho icon have braved the icy waters with the rest of us? That, I suspect, would be a posturing photo-op too far even for him.