NICE, France, April 11, 2007 - French free-diving champion Loic Leferme died Wednesday during during training practice off Nice on the Mediterranean coast.

it si reported that Leferme, 36, suffered heart failure when the rope pulling him to the surface at the end of a practice dive got lodged, colleagues said.

"The rope got caught on something under the water, I have no idea what," said Cedric Palerm, who was on a seperate support vessel.

Another diver immediately went down and found Leferme at a depth of around 60 feet.

"He'd gone beyond the black-out stage. We gave him heart massage, got out the oxygen. Then we raced to the emergency services in Nice. We were there in ten minutes," said Palerm.

For several years Laferme held the record of the "world's deepest man", achieving a depth of 564 feet or 1717 meters without a breathing apparatus in 2004. In 2005 he was surpassed by the Austrian Herbert Nitsch.