9 years ago
Tuesday, October 16, 2012
King of the daredevils: Thought plummeting 24 miles at 834mph was crazy? Just read what else Fearless Felix has been up to!
As a boy, Felix Baumgartner could hardly go past a tree without wanting to climb it. Flick through his childhood photos and more than half of them are of him at the top of one.
‘I wanted to climb everything,’ he says. ‘I loved to get to the top of a building, a house, a tree, whatever. I loved watching the world from above.
The air is my element. I like to be up there as much as I can.’
And then, of course, once he had got up there, he had to get down again.
Millions of people around the world watched frozen in shock on Sunday as the Austrian skydiver stepped out of a capsule 24 miles above the Earth.
It wasn’t just a question of whether he would get down alive, but also, who in his right mind would do such a thing?
Who would board a tiny capsule and float up by balloon to the edge of space before hurling himself through the air at up to 834mph, faster than the speed of sound?
For many, it was the first they had heard of ‘Fearless Felix’.
But, in fact, his plunge — the highest and fastest yet made by a skydiver — was only the crowning achievement on a career that has seen him make more than 2,600 jumps, most of them utterly terrifying.
Baumgartner has jumped from a plane and flown across the Channel with wings strapped to his back. He’s jumped off the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro, and the 101-storey Taipei Tower in Taiwan.
Nothing in Baumgartner’s family background suggests he would become the world’s most adventurous daredevil.
He was born in the beautiful Alpine city of Salzburg. Baumgartner’s father, a carpenter also called Felix, and mother, Eva, a farmer, didn’t do any sport at all — not even skiing in the surrounding mountains.
When Felix announced he wanted to be a stuntman, they pressed him to get a ‘decent job’ — his brother Gerard, now 41, followed their advice and became a chef
But there was a parachute club near where they lived and as soon as Felix turned 17 — the legal age for skydiving in Austria — he joined the club. Soon afterwards, he watched a video of a man parachuting off a cliff in the Yosemite national park in California and was desperate to do it himself.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments
(
Atom
)
No comments :
Post a Comment