RAISED BY THE SEA
Dina Levačić is a marathon swimmer from Split, Croatia, born in 1996. She learned to swim at four, swam her first open-water race at nine, and has never really left the sea since. Today she is also a keynote speaker, a researcher and a voice for ocean conservation.
At 21 she completed the Triple Crown in just 90 days: around Manhattan, the Catalina Channel and the English Channel. On her 27th birthday in 2023 she finished the Oceans Seven, the seven toughest ocean channels in the world, as the youngest woman in history, the 23rd person ever and the first from the former Yugoslavia. In 2026 she became the first person to swim around St Helena, 47 km in 17 hours 13 minutes, and soon after swam 16 km across Lake Titicaca at 3,812 metres.
She holds three Guinness World Records and is an Honor Swimmer of the International Marathon Swimming Hall of Fame. The World Open Water Swimming Association named her 2023 Woman of the Year, and Večernji list made her its Person of the Year 2024. She has also received the Franjo Bučar State Award for Sport and three Croatian presidential medals.
WAVES OF IMPACT
The sea has given her a lot, so she tries to give something back. For 104 Dalmatians she swam around 104 Dalmatian islands, and through Bit’ u moru: Dina and Friends for the Mediterranean Monk Seal she rallies people to protect the endangered monk seal. Her charity swims have raised more than €50,000 for children with developmental difficulties, people with disabilities, young people facing mental health challenges, children without parental care and abandoned animals.
At the University of Split School of Medicine she is finishing a PhD on what marathon swimming does to the body and the mind, based on interviews with 30 elite channel swimmers from 14 countries. Before that she earned a master’s in educational rehabilitation at the University of Zagreb.
COURAGE = FACING YOUR FEARS
“Being brave means being ready to face your fears. You don’t grow in your comfort zone, and “What if?” is always worse than failure.”
In her talks Dina describes the moments when cold water, currents and exhaustion pushed her to quit, and how she kept going anyway. Behind the Oceans Seven, St Helena and Titicaca are real decisions, real fears and the people in the boat, and those are where her lessons for work come from.
Audiences leave with more than a swimming story. They take away simple tools: how to break a big goal into “five more minutes”, how to separate what you control from what you have to accept, and why every solo achievement is really a team effort.
Whether she is swimming in icy water, coaching young swimmers or getting people involved in protecting the sea, she sticks to one rule: limits are there to be tested.
“Learning too soon our limitations, we never learn our powers.” –Mignon Mclaughlin
