Archive for the ‘Extreme Sports Personalities’ Category

We have blogged about the extraordinary biking skills of Danny MacAskill previously and wanted to show you what he has been up to recently. But first a little history on this gifted and dedicated individual.

MacAskill  grew up in Dunvegan on the Isle of Skye and started riding a bike from a very early age – probably not unlike most of us but the difference was that MacAskill never stopped riding. In his own words , ‘My motivation to ride has always been having fun’ .

What more needs to be said – if you are going to get very good at what you are doing we suggest that you should enjoy  your chosen sport because if you are to be the best you will definitely have to spend a lot of time doing it.

Below is one of MacAskill’s  video’s, produced by brainchildfilms

MacAskill now lives in Edinburgh, Scotland and rides bikes of various descriptions all the time.

‘The main bike I ride for street/trials is my Inspired bike, but I have a few other bikes for different kinds of riding too. I also ride a bit of natural trails on a 26″ bike, it’s hard but a lot of fun. Also, I really enjoy Mountain Bike cross country/freeride as well, I definitely get the same buzz riding my big full suspension down hills as I do riding my trials bike! It’s a lot faster so you get a lot more adrenalin!!’

We think its great to see what MacAskill gets up to with his wizardry on 2 wheels and it is also great to see someone who has got to the top making himself a decent living which we hope will be an inspiration to all you wannabees. MacAskill is now hired by major companies such as Volkswagen to star in their commercials as can be see in the video below from  ItsGlandular.

Well done Danny Macaskill.

If you are a keen snowboarder and extreme winter sports enthusiast and have been wondering what happened to Shaun White between the end of the 2009 winter season and his re-appearance in New Zealand late August, wonder no further…

This is what a powerful sponsor (redbull) can do to on behalf of a top athlete.

Shaun White is an incomparable snowboarder who has constantly taken the sport to extreme levels. He is the first athlete ever to land back to back double corks and remains the only skater to land the body varial frontside 540 (The Armadillo).

He is also the first snowboarder to win back-to-back gold medals in the Winter X-Games Superpipe. He is the first (and only) person to win both a Summer and Winter Dew Cup. He won the Revolver Golden God Award for “Most Metal Athlete” and he has won TransWorld SNOWboarding Rider Of The Year twice, once in 2003  and again in 2006.

Red Bull, a keen extreme sports promoter, has reason to put their faith in Shaun White.

In February 2009 he teamed up with Red Bull to create a custom-made half pipe in the rugged depths of the San Juan mountains outside Silverton, Colorado. This would allow him to work on a series of new tricks that will change the sport forever

This was Project X.

“I’ve had all these tricks I wanted to try. I just needed a place to figure them out,” said White. Not only the place, but the privacy… not only then privacy but perfect conditions… imagine a half-pipe never touched before by another soul…

It took 2 months and 30 heli-bomb dropped avalanches to get enough loose snow to form the perfect pipe.

Not only 30 heli-bombs to move 250,000 cubic yards of snow, but 300 man hours, 7,200 foam blocks and 8,000 lbs of welded steel were used to create the world’s first on-mountain snowboarding foam pit to allow White to practice his death defying tricks.

“You have to keep pushing yourself as an athlete” he says, and in his vocabulary this means pushing himself beyond what has been, to date, considered possible.

He aerial assaulted the foam pit trying out trick after trick allowing the conditions to give him the freedom of seeing whether the tricks in his mind could actually be carried out. And when he had perfected them in the pit, he took them to his very own pipe.

And so, with help from Red Bull, he has taken the sport from today into tomorrow…

A front double cork 10, a switchback 900, double back rodeo and cab double cork 10 are all things to look out for when White performs this year.

That formidable training has already born fruit. He won the NZ Open World Cup late August by pulling off a frontside lein air, backside 900, frontside 720, cab double cork 1080, to a front 1080 in his first run, and a straight air, backside 500, frontside 720, cab double cork 1080, front double cork 1080 on his second run.

With Project X, Red Bull demonstrates how the company is ‘changing the game’ when it comes to investing its marketing dollars. While some brands are investing millions of dollars in signage and presenting sponsorships, Red Bull is radically changing, owning, and creating sports properties and unique concepts of its own.

With Project X, Red Bull takes athlete/partnerships/endorsements to a new level. Both brands (Red Bull and Shaun White) will clearly benefit from this campaign – and this will also help Red Bull’s exposure leading into the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

The might and power of Red Bull allowed this dream to become a reality for White and perhaps one day Silverton too will benefit from Project X. The half pipe is completely visible from the ski area so perhaps one day it can be used by everyone…

You can see more about Project X here: www.redbullprojectx.com

“The climbing experience offers something that’s very hard to get in today’s society, infatuated as it is with video games and reality TV and almost divorced from the natural world and real challenge” – Jeff Lowe

If you have done any ice-climbing in the past or intend to give it a go this winter, you will no doubt have heard of Jeff Lowe.

Lowe, a Utah native who was skiing at four and was making technical rope climbs in the Tetons with his father at 6, has been ascending the tallest mountains since somewhere in the 1960’s. Back then there was no such thing as sport or trad. Jim Donini, one of Lowe’s climbing partners, says “He was an all-rounder—he did it all. Although at the time, it was just known as climbing.”

Having stood atop the Himalayas and the highest and most difficult mountains in the Alps, it was his 1978 solo climb up frozen Bridalveil Falls in the rugged San Juan Mountains near Telluride, Colorado, that put Lowe firmly into the history books. Four years earlier he, and friend Mike Weis, had been the first climbers to make it up the 40-story column of ice. In 1978 Lowe did it solo and has subsequently retained an almost mythical status amongst ice climbers.

From the beginning, he was a climbing purist. He believes in fast, light climbing — one or two climbers, possibly three, each carrying everything he needs on his back; no fixed ropes or established camps; camping on the face of the mountain; no oxygen; the most technically challenging routes, often ones that have never been attempted; the use of only one or two ropes.

“I’m not a big adrenaline junkie,” he says. “If you get that, it means things are out of control. I try to avoid that. I hate big shots of adrenaline. It means you don’t have enough margin. That’s why I didn’t kill myself in 40 years of hard-core climbing. I know there are people who think adrenaline is a big part of it. For me, it was finding out what I could do safely.”

Instead of adrenaline, Lowe sought the aesthetics of climbing — the beauty and solitude of his surroundings, the physical and mental challenges of technical climbing and self-discovery.

It was his attempt of the North Ridge of Latok 1 (7,145 m or 23,441 ft) in Pakistan that is considered to be one of the greatest alpine endeavors of all time. Jim McCarthy calls it “by far the greatest failure of American mountaineering.”

Lowe and his team, Jim Donini, Michael Kennedy and cousin George Lowe, spent 26 days on the mountain and came within 122m (400 ft) of the summit, a high point that still holds. Donini cites diminishing fuel reserves, Jeff’s illness from a near-fatal virus and horrendous weather as the main reasons for their retreat. To this day, the North Ridge of Latok 1 awaits a first ascent, despite numerous attempts.

He has accumulated in excess of 1,000 first ascents including the first ascent of the now famed Moonlight Buttress in Zion National Park (V, 5.9, A3, 1971) which he climbed with Mike Weis, plus numerous others in the Alps, Dolomites, Cascades, Himalayas, Rockies, and Andes. He once calculated the number of nights he had spent bivouacked in a tent on the face of a cliff; it added up to several years.

His some-time climbing partner Jim Donini, recent past president of the AAC and a top alpinist, credits Lowe with importing ice-climbing techniques from Europe. He returned with a renewed notion of what was possible. Such first ascents as Bridalveil Falls (WI6, 1974) in Colorado, and Keystone Greensteps (WI5, 1975), Alaska, are Lowe’s ice climbing legacy.

Jim McCarthy says “He transformed ice climbing, period.”

During the late 1990s, while the ESPN Winter X-Games were still held in Big Bear, California, event organizers needed an innovative structure for the ice-climbing competition but the temperatures were too high (60 F) to create frozen waterfalls. After a few days of brainstorming, Lowe came up with the idea of a refrigerated free-standing holographic ice tower … and ice climbing went X-treme!

This tower has now been purchased by Ogden Climbing Parks, a non-profit organization which Lowe is associated with,  and will soon be erected in Ogden’s Big-D Sports Park providing reliable and easy access Ice Climbing. This will be a MAJOR contribution to Ogden as a recreation centre and will draw hundreds of ice climbers to the area.

In the late 1990s Lowe developed multiple system atrophy, a neurodegenerative disorder similar to MS. In 2004, at the age of 53 he had to give up climbing altogether. It is a cruel irony that the man who once solo-climbed a 40-story pillar of ice and became a legend and a Sports Illustrated cover boy with his international climbing exploits should contract such a cruel disease.

“It’s poetic injustice,” he says. “I say that tongue in cheek. I’m not saying ‘Why me?’ I’m saying, ‘Why not me?’ A lot of people have worse disabilities than I do.”

But this did not signal the end of life as he knew it to him – he just took another direction and now continues his involvement and passion for climbing through Ogden Climbing Parks. His goal is to promote and develop the climbing potential around Ogden, Utah. Ogden Climbing Parks also runs programs that allow underprivileged children and those with disabilities to enjoy the climbing experience.

Ogden, with its ambition to become the sports adventure centre of America is fortunate to have someone of Jeff Lowe’s caliber on their team. He was recruited to create a climbing park and to develop Ogden’s potential as a climbing haven. With his passion for mountaineering and his experience, he intends to revolutionise climbing in Ogden, working diligently to secure and open new climbing areas throughout the region.

“I enjoyed climbing so much that I’m getting a lot of joy in passing it along,” he says.

A man to admire…

Whilst looking into the life of Noel Odell, a great climber and adventurer of his time, I stumbled across this wonderful speech from Jan Smuts which was used in an obituary for Odell. I thought all mountain climbers would appreciate and empathise with. Smuts delivered this speech at the summit on Table Mountain, South Africa, at the end of the Great Wall:

“And so it has come about that finally in man all moral and spiritual values are expressed in terms of altitude. The low expresses degradation both physical and moral. If we wish to express great intellectual or moral or spiritual attainment, we use the language of altitudes. We speak of men who have risen, of aims and ideals that are lofty, we place the seat of our hghest religious ideal in Heaven, and we consign all that is morally base to nethermost hell. Thus the metaphors embedded in language reflect but the realities of the progress of terrestrial life. The mountain is not merely something externally sublime. It has a great historic and spiritual meaning for us. It stands for us as the ladder of life. Nay, more, it is the ladder of the soul, and in a curious way the source of religion. From it came the Law, from it came the Gospel in the Sermon on the Mount. We may truly say that the highest religion is the religion of the Mountain. What is that religion? When we reach the mountain summits we leave behind us all the things that way heavily down below on our body and our spirit. We leave behind all sense of weakness and depression;  we feel a new freedom, a great exhilaration, an exaltation of the body no less than the spirit. We feel a great joy. The religion of the Mountain is in reality the religion of joy, of the release of the soul from the things that weigh it down and fill it with a sense of weariness, sorrow and defeat. The religion of joy releases the freedom of the soul, the soul’s kinship to the great creative spirit, and its dominance over all things of sense. The mountains behold us and the stars beckon to us. The mountains of our land will make a constant appeal to us to live the higher life of joy and freedom.”

Beautiful isn’t it?

Jan Smuts

Jan Smuts was, of course, that great statesman who lived well before his time. A politician, world-famed statesman, soldier, naturalist, philosopher and eventually a former Prime Minister of South Africa, he played an important role in the drafting of the constitution of the League of Nations the exact design and implementation of which relied upon him. He later urged the formation of a new international organisation for peace: the United Nations. Smuts wrote the preamble to the United Nations Charter, and was the only person to sign the charters of both the League of Nations and the UN. He also sought to redefine the relationship between the United Kingdom and her colonies, by establishing the British Commonwealth. In 1941 he was promoted to field marshal of the British Army. He was opposed to segregation and apartheid in South Africa and in 1946 opened a commission to investigate these. “The idea that the Natives must all be removed and confined in their own kraals is in my opinion the greatest nonsense I have ever heard.”

Noel Ewart Odell

Noel Ewart Odell was an English geologist and mountaineer born in 1890, died 1987. In 1924 he was an oxygen officer on the Everest expedition in which George Mallory and Andrew Irvine famously perished during their summit attempt. Impressively, Odell spent two weeks living above 23,000 feet (7,000m) without any supplementary oxygen. He had earlier stated that it was his “firm belief .. that Everest can be climbed without oxygen”.

On the successful summitting of Nanda Devi (25,660ft), H.W. Tilman,  Odell’s climbing partner, said: “In 1936 he climbed Nanda Devi when he seemed so much fitter than the rest of us that I considered his age (47) to be immaterial.” It is worth remembering that Nanda Devi was the highest mountain climbed and remained the highest until 1950.

In keeping with Jan Smut’s statement on Table Mountain, Noel Odell agreed with the essence of the  statement and went on to say: “Indeed, one’s spirit must aspire ever upwards, metaphorically and in actuality, raising higher and higher one’s lethargic body. Or, to to express it as Robert Browning does, in another way: “a man’s reach must exceed his grasp, else what’s heaven for?”

Poets, philosophers and statesmen alike.

“I am doing it for the thrill, for that feeling of danger and freedom.This is my way of expressing myself… We set ourselves limits, but we are all strong enough to aim higher, to achieve our goals. All we have to do is find such within ourselves. Know how to develop it… I do think that sometimes faith can move mountains”

Alain Robert

I do come across the most extroadinary people, places and events in my various researches, but Alain Robert has to be one of the most extroadinary people I have yet written about. Unfortunately, his urban climbing is so extra-extroadinary that I can find very little information on his equally fantastic rock climbing feats so have had to make do with stunning photographs instead… let me stop blathering and leave you to read about the French, or Human, Spiderman yourself.

Born in 1962, Alain Robert is the world’s most accomplished urban climber. He has scaled more than 85 buildings around the globe including the Eiffel Tower – 314m (1,027 ft), the Sydney Tower – 319m (1,047 ft), the Petronas Twin Towers – 452m (1,488 ft) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Sears Tower Chicago – 443m (1,453 ft) and Taipei 101 – 508 m (1,667 ft).

Robert began climbing as a young boy, scaling rock cliffs in the area around his home. His ‘buildering’ career began at the age of 12 when he forgot his keys and was locked out of his parents’ eighth-floor apartment. Instead of waiting for them to return home, he simply scaled the exterior wall…

As this video from racchroxz testifies, his rock and urban climbs  do not include rope or rigging. He uses only his hands, chalk, and climbing shoes.

He is  an accomplished rock climber. In 1993 he achieved a world record for the most extreme solo performance in the Gorge du Verdon in the south of France.

In 1982 he suffered two accidents, the first in January at the age of 19 and the second in September at the age of 20. He fell 15 metres (49 ft) on both occasions. He suffered multiple fractures (to his cranium, nose, wrists, elbows, pelvis, and heels). He now suffers from permanent vertigo.

The doctors considered him 60 percent handicapped and told him he would not be able to climb again. However, within 6 months he was back doing what he loves most – climbing. He kept taking on more and more challenging structures and improving his skills. He polished his rock-climbing skills in the French Alps before turning to buildings.

In an interview in 2005 he admitted that he had fallen 7 times although the worst fall was the one in 1982. In 2004, he fell 2 metres (6 ft 6.7 in) when climbing a traffic light whilst posing for a photo in an interview. He landed on his elbow and needed forty stitches, but a month later he climbed the world’s tallest skyscraper at the time, Taipei 101, as part of its official opening week.

It was in 1994 that he began free solo climbing  the world’s tallest urban structures that would earn him the nickname  “The French Spiderman”.

He recently said that his most challenging urban climb was the Sears Tower (now Willis Tower) in Chicago Illinois in 1999. As he neared the top of the tower, the fog came down covering the glass and metal wall of the last 20 floors with moisture making it dangerously slippery. This made the climb considerably more dangerous, slower and more strenuous. However, nothing was going to stop him and he reached the top safely and successfully.

In 2008 he successfully scaled Hong Kong’s Four Seasons Hotel, a 45-story building and his third known urban climb in that city. To succeed, he had to resort to a strategy he has used many times in the past – to set off at dawn as  the Hong Kong police had been tipped off about a possible illegal ascent in the city.

Robert used the climb to promote greater awareness and international action for the cause of global warming.

He was briefly detained by authorities after the climb before being released. He has, in fact, been arrested and fined more than 100 times for illegally climbing the world’s tallest urban structures during the last two decades. These arrests and trials have been little more than formalities, although in 2007, in China, he was jailed and then deported after climbing the  88 story-skyscraper called the Jin Mao Tower – 420 m (1,378 ft).

“We set ourselves limits, but we are all strong enough to aim higher, to achieve our goals. All we have to do is find such strength within ourselves. Know how to develop it” he says.

His latest climb was the Petronas Tower in Malaysia – 452 m (1,483 ft) on 1st September this year. He successfully stood atop the highest point of the Tower.

Many of his climbs provide him no opportunity to rest and can last over an hour. That’s all! he attributes a lot of his success to his height – 1.65 m (5′5″) – which, being short and light, enhances his dexterity. He is, of course, in peak physical condition and has expert climbing techniques.

I suggest you visit his site, www.alainrobert.com – it’s worth it!

Photo courtesy of Carlo Borlenghi – Alinghi

So here she is – the defender for the 33rd Americas Cup – to be held just off the coast of the United Arab Emirates at Ras Al Khaimah in February of next year – Alinghi 5. Team president, Ernesto Bertarelli, who is Italian by birth and moved to Switzerland in 1977, is a successful and passionate sailor who has raced at the highest level for most of his life,  is 100% committed to retaining the trophy with Alinghi 5.

But first a little history which goes some way to explaing why The Americas Cup is so special – thanks to Hamish Ross for this insight.

‘The America’s Cup is a symbol of yachting supremacy. Winning the America’s Cup is one of the most difficult sporting accomplishments possible.

The Cup itself was made in 1848 by Garrards of London who were, at the time, the Royal Jewellers. The Cup was one of several identical cups made at the time. It languished at Garrards, unsold, for several years until it was purchased by the Royal Yacht Squadron as a trophy for a special race held in the year of the Great Exhibition of 1851 held in London. Now, it is a priceless sporting treasure.

A syndicate of 5 members of the New York Yacht Club built and sailed a schooner they called America to Britain where it entered the Royal Yacht Squadron’s race which was open to all nations but in fact was only raced by America and other yachts of the Royal Yacht Squadron. America convincingly won the race and took the Cup home to New York amongst great acclaim’……..they then continuously held the cup for 132 years until 1983.

Since then, besides the American team who held the trophy from 1987 to 1995 it has been won by 4 other nations – Australia, New Zealand, Italy and now Switzerland.

The Swiss won The Americas Cup in 2003, defended it again in 2007 against a Kiwi challenge and will face the challenge of the Golen Gate Yacht Club in 2010 – Larry Ellison will do all he can with USA to bring the cup home.

Alinghi 5

We wrote about BOR90 – or USA – as she is now called – in a previous blog. This is what she is challenging.

Alinghi 5 is a 90ft multihull with a beam comparable to the width of two tennis courts set side by side and a mast that towers some 17 stories high. The boat was launched on the 8 July and underwent its maiden sail on the 20 July on Lake Geneva in Switzerland.

On the 7 August, the catamaran was transported by helicopter from its home port of Lake Geneva to a temporary training base in Genoa, Italy from where it was reported in early September that she had suffered a structural failure. We understand that she is now in transit to RAK where trials and testing will continue.

In the video from AdonnanteTv below you can see she is a very fast boat – the challenge has been made, is the defender ready?