Extreme sports: the Rise and Fall of Shane McConkey from The Observer
guardian.co.uk The Observer
Extreme sports: the Rise and Fall of Shane McConkey
He was the world's greatest extreme athlete – an expert skier, Base jumper and daredevil. But after he died in March performing an outrageous stunt, you had to ask: are adventure sports killing their stars?
That last morning, they rode the Sass Pordoi cable car to the summit. Deep in the Dolomite Alps of Italy, Sass Pordoi, at 9,685 feet, is more for tourists and hikers than for skiers; its table-like summit is almost completely ringed by cliffs. But Shane McConkey and JT Holmes had no interest in marked ski runs. They were there for the cliffs.
Clipping in, they skated across the plateau and skied down about 300 vertical feet before traversing a slanting ledge. The snow was firm, verging on icy, so they switched their skis for crampons. It had snowed during the night, and they had already triggered a small slab avalanche, which slid away from under them and roared over the side, falling hundreds of feet. They paused to collect their wits, then kept going, reaching their destination just before 2pm.
McConkey had jumped this cliff before, in summer, and ski-Baseing it had been on his to-do list ever since. Now he was pushing 40, he was checking items off that list as fast as he could.
To gauge the height of the cliff, they threw stones over the side and timed the drop. Eleven seconds later, Holmes heard one smack the scree field at the Base. They guessed the cliff was about 1,400 feet tall, maybe more. Holmes remembers that the trees down in the valley looked really small, and he took comfort in that; it suggested they were high enough to pull off a stunt nobody else but them had ever done: a combined ski-wingsuit-Base jump.
McConkey and Holmes would ski down a steep, hanging snowfield and launch themselves straight off the edge of the cliff; jettisoning their skis, they would then spread their arms and legs to open a wingsuit, a hi-tech fabric garment that would allow them to fly. Steering the wingsuit with their arms, they would swoop out over the valley like flying squirrels before finally throwing their chutes to land. Two camera crews would film the whole thing for Matchstick Productions, the world's leading maker of ski movies.
On paper, the stunt sounds insane, but it was something McConkey and Holmes had been carefully developing for years. They had both done ski-wingsuit-Base jumps before; JT had pulled one from a nearby cliff the day before. After sizing up the line and choosing the best takeoff point, McConkey and Holmes used their avalanche shovels to pile the thin, windblown snow onto their run-in, building a small kicker jump at the edge to carry them well clear of the wall.
Finally, at 5.30pm, the light was perfect for filming. The men tested their bindings one more time, pulling on the release straps they had designed. Both sets released perfectly. JT radioed the film crew: all set. "Dropping!" he called, and leaned down the slope, arcing six strong, graceful turns before pointing his skis toward the edge and launching himself off the kicker into open air.
Holmes turned two quick backflips, then yanked on the straps that jettisoned his skis, arching his back and spreading his arms and legs so the wingsuit could catch the air. He flew away from the wall for 15 to 20 seconds before the sharp report of his chute banging open echoed across the valley and up the cliff. As he dropped to the snow, Holmes noticed that the trees in the valley really were small, but he didn't think much of it; turning, he pointed his helmet cam back up the cliff, waiting to film his best friend's jump.
But McConkey never came. Later, when Holmes forced himself to watch his friend's helmet-cam footage, he saw exactly what had happened. McConkey had jumped not long after him and hit the kicker perfectly. But when he came out of his flips and yanked the release straps, only his right ski came off; the left one stayed fixed to his boot. Worse, the right ski had snagged on the left, leaving both skis attached to his body. As McConkey picked up speed, his free fall became more unstable. If he threw his chute, it would go straight up into his skis and get tangled.
But JT could see that even in this desperate situation, Shane didn't panic. They had talked about this scenario. Shane calmly, methodically reached down to manually release the binding, working to get the right ski off as he plummeted to earth. Finally it popped free: both skis flew clear from his body, and McConkey was able to quickly flip over onto his belly to throw his chute. But he was already nine seconds into free fall, and the ground was right there, rushing up to meet him at 110 miles per hour.
It was fitting that Shane McConkey went out with his ski boots on. Whether or not it was inevitable is subject to debate. A once-in-a-generation athlete, McConkey had not only influenced the way people skied; he actually altered the skis themselves, first by jump-starting the fat-ski revolution in the mid-1990s, and then by inventing pontoon-style powder skis, based on water skis, that are fast becoming standard for soft snow.
In a sport where 60-foot cliff jumps are now common ski-movie fare, McConkey was still pushing at the boundaries. Year after year, in film after film, nobody went bigger than Shane and JT. They were already the acknowledged masters of ski-Baseing, having skied off the world's most spectacular cliffs, from the north face of the Eiger to Norway's Trollstigen Wall. It was there that they filmed a shot-for-shot re-creation of the opening scene of The Spy Who Loved Me, with McConkey as James Bond leaping off the 3,000-foot precipice, pursued by Holmes.
Such exploits cemented McConkey's status. Best of all, he was getting paid to live his dream, by Red Bull, K2, and other sponsors. Even at 39, with a wife and three-year-old daughter back in Squaw Valley, California, he wasn't ready to give it up. "You step off the edge, and everything goes away," an emotional McConkey explained to an interviewer in early March this year, days before he died. "You're flying now. You're a bird."
McConkey was just as well known for his shaggy, approachable persona, freckle-faced smile, and sense of humour apparently on loan from Beavis and Butthead. He was always playing a joke, often as his alter ego, Saucer Boy – a neon-Bogner-jacketed, Jack Daniel's-swilling, saucer-riding, ass-grabbing caricature of, well, Shane McConkey. Even if you'd never met McConkey, you felt like you knew him. More than 2,000 people packed his memorial service at Squaw in April, and countless tributes appeared on YouTube. Online donations poured in for Shane's widow, Sherry, and daughter, Ayla. He was mourned in ski towns from Chile to Bulgaria; one friend, snowboarder Jeremy Jones, christened an unnamed Alaskan peak "Mount McConkey", and another friend commemorated him by dropping into one of Shane's favourite steep runs naked.
It was also a rough time for Red Bull, which had lost another athlete, Chris Muller, in a 2005 hang-gliding accident as he dived to snatch a sack of prize money off the ground. Shane's death made the company's slogan – "It gives you wings" – now seem unfortunate at best. And just one month before McConkey's accident, Rock Star energy drink-sponsored motocrosser Jeremy Lusk was killed in a backflip attempt in Costa Rica (see p44).
The toll among adventure athletes over the past decade is sobering, with a new obituary appearing every few months. Climbers Todd Skinner and Dan Osman. Mountaineers Charlie Fowler and Jean Christophe "JC" Lafaille. Swedish adventurer Göran Kropp, who in 1996 cycled all the way to Everest Base Camp, made a solo ascent, and rode home, but died in a rock-climbing accident six years later. Then there was big-mountain skier Doug Coombs, who died in a fall in April 2006, leaving behind a wife and young child.
"Man, I miss Doug Coombs," McConkey told ESPN the Magazine in 2007. "When I found out he died doing the same stuff I do, it was a reality check. I think about him every time I'm in a dangerous situation. It's a reminder: be careful."
McConkey was careful – meticulous to the point of neurotic, friends say. "Shane's one of those guys that's so talented you never expect something like this to happen," said Holmes. "He really thinks things through, and he has so much talent to fall back on. Nobody thinks Superman can die, you know?"
But when news of McConkey's death hit the mainstream media, the reaction was somewhat different: how could he not have died? And what was the risk-taking for? A vicious debate broke out online between McConkey's fans and anonymous posters writing things like, "Sorry, but I don't feel sorry for him. He HAD to know that this sport would kill him someday, he just didn't know what day. When you get bored with life and push the envelope, your number will come up sooner than later."
But "bored with life" is hardly a phrase friends would use to describe McConkey. And he was far from reckless: his stunts were the result of a decade of careful progression, beginning with skydiving in the late 1990s and including hundreds of Base jumps, ski-Bases, and wingsuit flights, each one logged and analysed. Holmes and others say Shane was the first to back out if conditions weren't right. He'd whittled the odds as much as he could, but the odds caught up with him, as they do in blackjack. The house always wins.
"My mind goes to the people left behind," says director Mark Obenhaus, who interviewed McConkey and Coombs for the film Steep. "I saw these guys as heroic in some way; there's something amazing and wonderful about what they were doing. But gosh, there's been a lot of tragedy."
Says Glen Plake, whose 1980s ski movies inspired McConkey's career: "When people are passing away on a monthly basis, you've got to wonder: have we gone too far here? Have we got to the point where the human body doesn't bounce that good after all?"
"Dude, this is a real kick to the soul for me," Miles Daisher says, looking up from his Red Bull parachute canopy, which lies bunched on the floor of his hotel room near Puget Sound in Washington state. Normally energetic to the point of hyperactivity – he once Base jumped 57 times in 24 hours, setting a world record – Daisher is sombre and subdued. "Shane was my best friend," he says.
It's mid-April, barely three weeks after McConkey's death, and a few members of the Red Bull skydiving, paragliding and Base-jumping team – the Red Bull Air Force – have gathered at an airfield near Renton, Washington, for a few days of intensive free-fall practice. Shane was supposed to be here too. He was a key member of the 12-strong Air Force, and arguably the most important: in 1998, a year after the Austrian energy drink went on sale in the US, he became the first North American athlete Red Bull sponsored.
At the time, McConkey was known primarily as a skier, but he was beginning to get into Base jumping. Daisher was living in the Trampoline House, a Squaw ski-bum hangout that was also home to skier Kent Kreitler and an accomplished young Base jumper named Frank Gambalie, who began teaching Miles and Shane his sport.
Though Base jumping had been around for two decades, it was still very underground and experimental. Shorthand for "buildings, antennas, spans, earth", Base jumping boils down to leaping off cliffs or fixed, tall structures with a parachute. But whereas skydivers could rely on reserve chutes and long-established techniques from paratroopers, early Base jumpers were essentially learning by trial and error – with "error" usually meaning death or serious injury. Jumpers would get tangled in their lines or caught by winds that slammed them into the cliff or structure from which they'd just jumped. As Daisher puts it: "In Base jumping, you're constantly doing things to try and save your life."
Gambalie was a master; he'd managed to leap off New York's Chrysler building, steering his chute between the skyscrapers and landing on a side street, where he hailed a cab to Brooklyn. That exploit alone qualified "The Gambler," as he was known, for immortality. Then in June 1999, after jumping from El Capitan, Gambalie fled from Yosemite park rangers and drowned in the Merced River.
After Gambalie died, Daisher and McConkey started Base jumping together, partly as a way to avenge their mentor's death. McConkey turned into a Base-jumping evangelist, and together with Miles staged a "Death Camp" – short for "Plunge to Your Death Camp" – where they convinced newbies to fling themselves off the Perrine Bridge across Idaho's Snake River Canyon. The first "campers" were their girlfriends (later wives), Sherry and Nikki, followed by friends like Scott Gaffney and JT Holmes. They Base jumped at their bachelor parties (after doing beer funnels) and pretty much anytime they had a few hours to spare. McConkey liked to brag about Death Camp's "100% failure rate", meaning nobody had actually died. His sense of humour was like that: ironic, with a dash of morbid.
By the time of his death, McConkey had more than 800 Base jumps to his credit – a good number of them with Daisher – with only one really close call, in 2003, when he jumped in bad conditions and slammed into a cliff called the Chief, near Whistler, British Columbia, as his wife and father watched. He barely managed to save himself by grabbing a lone pine tree on a ledge halfway down – then pulled out his cell phone and called Daisher, back in Squaw, for advice.
McConkey also hooked Daisher up with a Red Bull sponsorship, which completely changed his friend's life. Up until that point, Daisher had been something of a dirtbag Base jumper, living in a tent and working as a parachute instructor. Red Bull paid him a basic retainer in the low five figures, plus additional money for appearing at demonstration events and going on Red Bull-sponsored expeditions. The money wasn't huge, but it meant that he and Nikki could actually buy a house in Twin Falls, Idaho, near the Base-legal Perrine Bridge – and Daisher could devote himself full-time to his passion.
Over the previous six months, McConkey and Daisher had been on a Base binge: they leaped into an enormous natural sinkhole in China; dropped from the Peak to Peak tram at Whistler; performed at an air show in Mexico; and wingsuited or Base jumped off pretty much every cliff in the fjordlands of New Zealand's South Island, where they spent three weeks this past February – normally the heart of McConkey's ski season – filming a movie for Red Bull. "We were on fire," Daisher says. And Red Bull paid for it all.
Red Bull is an adventure athlete's dream sponsor. From the beginning, it has eschewed the wholesome, cereal-box type of jock in favour of a bolder, edgier breed; the company's burgeoning stable now includes top snowboarders and surfers, plus a rowdy posse of skateboarders, BMXers, kayakers, climbers, motocrossers, and paragliders – all of whom share one trait: a total disregard for the law of gravity.
McConkey was Red Bull's Athlete Zero. Instead of having him sit in front of cameras and recite some ad agency script, the company paid him to travel the world to ski and Base jump with his buddies – including one epic trip to northern Canada's Baffin Island in 2001, where he, Daisher, and three other Air Force members jumped off cliffs a mile high. His chief responsibility was to make sure he wore his silver and blue Red Bull helmet whenever the cameras were rolling.
"It's sort of like having a rich uncle who thinks these sports are cool," says Red Bull-sponsored ice climber and explorer Will Gadd. "But we'd all be doing these things anyway, with or without Red Bull."
The "rich uncle" is Dietrich Mateschitz, the company's publicity-shy founder. Mateschitz had been a marketing executive in the 1980s when he discovered a Thai energy drink called Krating Daeng; he secured the distribution rights, tarted it up for Western palates, and proceeded to create – and dominate – the energy-drink market. (Red Bull's 2008 sales topped $4.3bn.) One way he did that was through savvy, non-traditional marketing, sponsoring athletes such as McConkey to push the limits of their sports. The more radical (and dangerous) their exploits, the more media coverage they would draw – and the more exposure Red Bull would get.
"If the whole world thought that we were totally sane and understood the sport we do the way we understand it, then people wouldn't be as interested," McConkey said a few weeks before he died. "And I wouldn't get paid to do it. I think it's great that people think we're nuts. It's on TV right now because people think it's nuts."
McConkey worked tirelessly developing new projects for Red Bull, all of his own devising. "Part of our relationship with him was to say, 'What ideas do you have?'" says one Red Bull employee who worked with McConkey. "He would come back with, on paper, the scariest-sounding trips ever. But that was Shane."
The answer from Red Bull was almost always the same: go for it. Mateschitz is particularly obsessed with flight – he maintains an aviation museum in Austria, not far from Red Bull's headquarters – and McConkey's quest to fly was right up his alley. Just before his death, McConkey had filmed a TV spot in which he performs a spectacular ski-Base, lands it, and says to the camera, "Welcome to my world. The world of Red Bull."
The spot was shelved after he died ("which sucks, because Shane would be pissed," the Red Bull employee says). A famously close-mouthed corporation, Red Bull issued a brief statement on McConkey's death, but said little else until two months later, when the company's head of sports marketing, Chris Mater, told me: "He was a member of our very tight family, and we were devastated when we heard about his accident. Working with Shane over the years was truly inspirational. Shane lived on a different plane, and his enthusiasm for life was incomparable."
But not all of McConkey's sponsors were quite so enthusiastic about his aerial pursuits. "To me, Base jumping is just the dumbest, wackiest, most ridiculous thing," says Rossignol's Tim Petrick, formerly of McConkey's ski sponsor K2 Sports. "I can't find the words to describe how much I think it's really a bad idea. And Shane got zero encouragement from us to do those things."
But Shane McConkey hardly needed encouragement; Red Bull helped give him a comfortable lifestyle and flew him all over the world, but he would have been jumping off cliffs even if he were still a penniless ski bum delivering pizzas. Which is pretty much how his mother, Glenn McConkey, saw his life playing out after high school, when he was dropped from the US Ski Team because he was too small.
"It was catastrophic," she remembers. "The biggest thing that ever happened to Shane was getting dumped by the US Ski Team. They motivated him, more than anybody else, to become a well-known skier."
In the short term, McConkey floundered. He dropped out of the University of Colorado at Boulder and jumped to the pro mogul tour – where he was disqualified from a competition at Vail for throwing a backflip. In protest, he rode the lift back up and skied the course naked. When the Vail ski patrol banned him, McConkey moved back to Squaw.
There weren't many ways to make a living by skiing in 1996, so McConkey founded the International Free Skiers Association, or IFSA (alternate meaning: "I Fucking Ski Awesome"). IFSA brought order to the underground world of extreme skiing by organising competitions with judging, rankings, and, most important, sponsors and prize money. He also helped launch a magazine, Freeze, to publicise the movement.
McConkey had essentially created his own dream job, with a simple business model: sponsors would pay him to use their skis and wear their jackets; he'd make sure he got into the right movies and magazines. If he did well in competitions, great, but the real goal was exposure. "A lot of people can think outside the box, have an idea or some sort of epiphany in their mind," says Holmes. "But Shane, with his follow-through, would make it happen."
Perhaps Shane's biggest epiphany was that his two favourite sports, skiing and Base jumping, could be combined. He had talked about it for years, while laying the groundwork, scouting lines and perfecting his technique. Finally, on 15 January 2003, he and JT stood atop a cliff near Tahoe called Lovers Leap. They were both really nervous, JT remembers, but when they skied off the edge, their parachutes opened perfectly and they landed elated.
Others had ski-Based before, notably Rick Sylvester, who performed Bond's stunts in The Spy Who Loved Me. Sylvester made the first recorded ski-Base from El Cap in 1972, and since then other daredevils had tried it, but JT and Shane were the first to incorporate it as a regular element in their skiing. The parachute let them ski lines no one had ever tried, precisely because they ended in giant cliffs. "We realised we could use a parachute the way ski mountaineers use a rope," McConkey explained in March. "We look at mountains with new goggles now."
Not many athletes had the nerve. "To keep it interesting, you've got to do something more with each jump, to further the progression," admits Will Gadd, who tried Base jumping but soon abandoned it. "For me, I could kind of see how it was gonna go. I thought the timeline was kind of short."
Having mastered the ski-Base jump, McConkey was already thinking of ways to up the ante. In Norway in 2007, while filming the Bond sequence, Shane and JT tried out something new: the ski-wingsuit-Base. Here was a trick nobody else was doing – and looking back, this might have been a warning sign. Shane was well aware of the odds: from their own experience, JT says, they knew that in one of roughly every 100 Base jumps, something goes wrong. The history of Base jumping and skydiving tells a grim tale, from Base founder Carl Boenish (died jumping in Norway in 1984) to wingsuit inventor Patrick de Gayardon (died in a skydiving mishap in Hawaii in 1998). It's dangerous to be a pioneer.
With the ski-wingsuit-Base, there was no one to show them the way, nobody else to make mistakes for them. They were in truly uncharted territory, but they weren't done: their mission on that fateful trip to Italy was to nail the first double-stage ski-Base, where they would ski off one cliff, parachute down and land on a snowfield, then cut away and drop off another cliff using a second chute – all in one fluid shot.
As McConkey said in the interview shortly before he died: "This is exploration for us." They were exploring parts of mountains that had never before been skied, but they were also pursuing that oldest, most tantalising, and most dangerous dream of all: the dream of human flight.
A Fatal Flip: Jeremy Lusk
Even before he climbed onto his dirt bike at a freestyle motocross (FMX) exhibition in Costa Rica, something didn't feel right to Jeremy Lusk. Only 24, Lusk, a husky San Diego kid, was able to do just about anything on his 225-pound bike: backflips, tail whips, body extensions in mid-air. "A next-generation star," as Wade Martin, head of the Alliance of Action Sports, described him. "One of the handful of guys driving the sport forward." Lusk projected a hardened image (his nickname: "Pitbull"), despite being a soft-spoken born-again Christian married to his high school sweetheart. And with an X Games gold medal last year and two more at a contest in Mexico, Lusk was on a roll.
In the locker room at San José's Ricardo Saprissa Stadium, Lusk confessed to fellow rider Myles Richmond that the ramps felt a little funny. It was so windy the promoters had erected makeshift barricades to block the gusts. "He said, 'It's just like anything else – it takes a couple of times to get it figured out,'" Richmond recalls.
Given the conditions, Richmond was surprised to see his friend attempt a difficult Hart Attack backflip (named after its pioneer, Carey Hart), in which a rider inverts his motorcycle in midair, extending his legs while beneath it. The real trick is returning to the seat before the bike lands. Richmond couldn't see the landing, but when the crowd roared, he assumed Lusk had pulled it off – until he saw Lusk's still body on a stretcher as medics rushed him to a hospital. He had hit the ground head first, so hard it pushed his neck back and split his helmet in two. Lusk died two days later. "It's sad to say, but I always felt someone was going to die in a big event," says Ryan Leyba, a now-retired motocross rider. "I just never thought it would be Jeremy."
Riders such as Travis Pastrana, Mike Metzger, and Brian Deegan were already pushing the Hart Attack's limits, pulling back-to-back flips or 360s that ended in broken backs and concussions. Leyba quit FMX altogether. "The sport was going in a direction I didn't want to go," he says. "It's so unnatural for a dirt bike to do that." As former ESPN assistant marketing director Ian Votteri recalls: "The level of risk was getting gnarlier. The riders were saying, God, what's next?"
For the riders aspiring to beat Hart and Pastrana, the backflip also appealed to their skinny wallets. Freestyle riders haul their bikes from contest to contest, hoping to hobble away with a few thousand dollars. The bigger the trick, the bigger the prize – and the better the chance of landing sponsors. The X-Knights contest in Costa Rica that claimed Lusk's life didn't require any particular moves, but its $10,000 prize was enough to get riders to test limits. "If you're one of the top guys, you're in for, what, five years?" says one action sports insider. "It's critical for them to one-up each other; that's where you make the money. There is no 'reunion tour' for these guys."
Lusk's death has raised uncomfortable questions. "Are there safety measures we can take?" asks X Games senior vice-president and managing director Rick Alessandri, who broached the idea of neck braces. "Maybe." It's doubtful a brace would have saved Lusk. Aaron Cooke of the Athlete Recovery Fund, a nonprofit organisation that helps athletes pay medical bills, says: "It's one of those things where the safety gear has to catch up to the injuries."
The day after Lusk's death, Richmond was flipping at a charity event at a children's hospital. "That's how he'd want us to be," he says. "I try not to think about it, but, my God, at every jump, it's in the back of my head." DAVID BROWNE
* guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009
