A weekend BASE jumping accident in a Utah canyon has claimed two lives, including that of Andy Lewis, an extreme athlete widely recognized for his 2012 Super Bowl performance alongside Madonna.
Authorities in Grand County, Utah, confirmed Lewis was among the deceased. He was a prominent figure in the high-risk sport of BASE jumping, which involves parachuting to the ground after leaping from tall fixed objects such as buildings, bridges, or desert cliffs overlooking deep canyons.
Lewis also excelled in the niche disciplines of slacklining and tricklining, which combine elements of high-wire walking with aerial acrobatics, often at perilous elevations.
His appearance during Madonna’s 2012 Super Bowl halftime show catapulted him from relative obscurity to overnight celebrity status.
Dressed in a Roman toga, Lewis bounced and executed tricks on his inch-wide line like it was a trampoline while Madonna sang behind him.
“My phone actually rang itself to death three days in a row,” Lewis said soon afterward in an appearance on Conan O’Brien’s late night show.
Emergency responders were dispatched Sunday to a report of people injured in a BASE jumping attempt at Mineral Bottom, a remote desert area near the Utah-Colorado line, according to the sheriff’s office. Lewis and an unidentified 50-year-old man died at the scene, the sheriff’s office said in a news release.
Sheriff’s Lt. Al Cymbaluk confirmed to The Associated Press that it was Lewis the extreme athlete who died. He said he had no further details on the fatal accident.
Lewis owned BASE Jump Moab, a business that offered excursions to inexperienced customers using tandem jumps, in which the customer was harnessed to a guide wearing the parachute.
At the same time, Lewis openly acknowledged the sport’s inherent danger.
“It’s weird to think about how many people are dead, because it’s like a normal thing,” Lewis told documentary filmmaker Ella Warnick in an interview published last year.
No one immediately returned phone, text and Facebook messages left Monday for BASE Jump Moab.
Lewis won four straight world championships in competitive slacklining from 2008 through 2011. Lewis set a Guinness World Record for slackline surfing, swaying his feet side to side in a rocking motion that mimics surfing, while keeping his balance above China’s Diaoshuilou waterfall in 2011.
In 2014, he walked a slackline suspended between two hot air balloons more than 4,000 feet (1,200 meters) above the Nevada desert.
More details here...
