On channel 7 in Australia they interviewed the leader of a Base jumping group. The guy said that Base jumping was no more dangerous than airplane parachuting, and that Base jumpers get a bad rap from the media.
David Koch (the interviewer) did a terrible job interviewing. He did not even ask the guy about the fact that it is usually illegal, and Coombs was killed jumping from a cliff where it is illegal to Base jump.
I vote for idiotic thrill seeking. It may be no more dangerous than convention jumping, for the jumpers, but what about the people who have to enforce the law and the rescue personel that often respond, perhaps making them unavailable for real emergencies? Not to mention the possibility of endangering other people around them. I don’t see it as a sport and if they’re expecting some adulation from me, they’ve got a long wait. I think they should pay a very heavy fine and spend a bit of time in the local pokey.
. . . which can be quite dangerous itself. You come up just a little short and you land on the booth with that lady giving out the HELLO, MY NAME IS . . . tags.
…a less-than-completely-sensible thrill-seeking activity, but yes, a recreational activity nonetheless.
Not every recreational activity is, or should be called, a “sport”. If BASE jumping is a sport, then so’s heavy nightclubbing (physically strenuous, expensive, risky).
It’s thrill seeking. It may or may not be idiotic depending on the person involved. I definitely dispute the quote that it is no more dangerous than conventional skydiving.
When skydiving you have time to open the reserve.
When skydiving, if your chute opens “off heading”, nothing bad happens. When BASE jumping your off heading chute might take you straight in to the cliff face you’re jumping off.
Who said the two things (sport vs. idiotic thrill-seeking) are mutually exclusive?
If sky-diving is a sport, then so’s base-jumping.
I suppose you could say there has to be some competitive aspect, but it’s like surfing, I guess - style is all (ermm, except when you fall off the board/chute doesn’t deploy - then it’s fairly obvious who lost)
I have a friend who’s a base jumper. He definitely falls into the “thrill-seeking idiot” category, and took it up after he’d been kicked out of a skydiving club for deploying way too late “for fun”.
BASE jumping off the Troll’s Wall is definitely idiotic. The only two reasons for doing it are 1) thrill-seeking or 2) suicide.
There are hundreds of cool places to jump off a cliff here in Troll Country, if that’s what floats your boat. A handful are illegal. They are illegal because they are particularly dangerous. It’s that simple.
A rescue team put their lives at risk to haul this guy’s sorry corpse down off the mountain. The “friends” he was jumping with ran away. I don’t have a whole lot of sympathy for BASE-jumping-as-sport right now.