|
Post by Sharon Faulkner on Apr 22, 2006 8:38:07 GMT -5
Base-jumper's heart-stopping leap 20 Apr 2006 Source: ITN Base-jumper Nicolás López has become the first person to leap from Venezuela's Sarisarinama mountain. The Argentinean made extreme sports history by completing the 350m jump in the Tepuy mountains after free-falling for five seconds and then parachuting for a further 15-20 seconds before landing safely in the treacherous cavern below. López said: "It's the most confined landing I have made in my entire whole parachuting career. There was no margin of error. The floor of the cave is totally uneven. "It's of collapsed stone blocks the size of a house crowned by a jungle over millions of years and there are holes, trees, all kinds of rocks, you can't walk, you have to climb, crawl, drag yourself to be able to get out of the cave. "So the landing, well, there was no chance for it to go wrong. It was that or treeing myself hard and a very complicated rescue," López said. López, who has been parachuting for years but first base-jumped in 1999, spent months preparing for the jump and wore a specially-tailored parachute to manoeuvre between the various obstacles in his path. www.channel4.com/news/content/news-storypage.jsp?id=1937446
|
|