A deadly weekend for extreme sports in the French Alps has claimed the lives of two climbers, a paraglider, a hang glider and a wingsuit jumper, reports The Guardian.
On Sunday afternoon, rescuers found a paraglider’s body on rocks in the Haute-Savoie region on the Swiss border, security forces said.
The man had plunged to his death from the Buclon mountain, which is 2,072 metres (6,797ft) high.
Earlier on Sunday, two French climbers – a 34-year-old man and a 37-year-old woman – died further south after falling 164ft down La Meije mountain.
On Saturday, a 32-year-old man died after diving off the Dent d’Arclusaz mountain in a wingsuit. Another wingsuit jumper died in the same spot three years ago.
The victim, from the Drôme department in south-east France, had made a jump on Saturday evening with five other people. But it was not until the others landed and realised his absence that they sounded the alarm at about 7.30pm. A search was immediately launched, but his body was not found until Sunday morning. An inquiry has been opened to determine the circumstances of his death.
Earlier in the day, a hang gliding instructor died aged 49 after plunging out of his two-seater near Lake Annecy. His student, who was not harmed in the incident, managed to land and alert the emergency services. Rescuers were unable to resuscitate the victim.
Wingsuit flying has been described as the world’s most dangerous sport, with more than 20 people reportedly killed last year. Practitioners jump from cliffs or other high surfaces wearing “birdman” suits with parachutes and “wing” flaps between the legs and between ankle and wrists, and can fly for kilometres.
Last year Jhonathan Florez, who held the world record for longest distance, longest time and highest altitude wingsuit flights, died on a training jump in the Swiss Alps, and in June this year, Dario Zanon, whose videos of his daredevil flights had made him one of the sport’s best-known figures, was killed in a crash on Mont Blanc.
Statistics on extreme sports are sketchy, but a study published in the medical journal Bandolier in 2007 comparing sports found that Base jumping, of which wingsuit flying is a variation, was by far the most dangerous, with a one in 2,317 chance of dying on each leap. The technology has improved since then, but a 2013 study in the Wilderness Medical Society journal found that the sport’s rising popularity was leading to more deaths, and that most deaths happened because people miscalculated their flying path and hit cliffs or the ground.
The Bandolier study found that, for hang gliding, the chance of death was one in nearly 117,000 flights.