As a Wingsuit BASE Jumper, Laurent Frat ‘s pursuit of high octane thrills certainly won’t be to everyone’s taste, but the acceptance of the sport has never been greater Words: Paul Dargan


A


merican Laurent Frat first strapped himself into a wingsuit just over a decade ago. At that time, he felt this rapidly expanding pursuit was heading towards troubled ground, despite the almost unparalleled thrill of hurtling off a


mountain at 200kph. “When I started wingsuit base jumping, there was very little instruction available. With only a few knowledgeable people out there, it was a somewhat mystical search for knowledge. You had to hunt out the guys who were willing to share this coveted information.


“Most unfamiliar with base jumping couldn’t believe what we were doing was possible, or that competitors would genuinely throw themselves off cliffs and mountains for the pursuit of the sport. But we did, and gradually, the numbers of those competing began to increase.”


With any emerging trend, a rise in participation is invariably accompanied by greater controls, but progress was slow, and the culmination of several years of inadequate self-regulation came in 2016 when 31 incidences of death or serious injury were recorded. Around the same time, researchers in the British Journal of Sports Medicine estimated base jumping to have a fatality and accident rate over 30 times greater than parachuting from a plane. “We got to the point where it was clear something had to be done,” he says. Most famously, in that year, Italian base jumper Uli Emanuele died at Lauterbrunnen in Switzerland during filming for a promotional video. The adventurer had received global acclaim for flying through a 9ft wide ‘needle’s eye’, and was been regarded as one of the most progressive names in the sport.


60 | WINTER 2020 | ONBOARD


©Dan Dupuis


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