It may have been faulty equipment or human error. Maybe a wind cyclone spouted from Arizona’s desert terrain, or it was just a freak accident.
It’s impossible to tell what caused Fredrick Engel’s parachute to deflate as he sped towards the earth from 100 feet in the air in 2006, except that what happened after can only be described as a miracle –– the 63-year-old from Middle Island, N.Y., survived.
That year, 21 fatal accidents occurred out of an estimated 2.5 million jumps, according to the United States Parachute Association. Engel narrowly missed raising the tally.
Engel “face-planted,” hitting the ground horizontally in what witnesses said sounded like “a bag of cement.” He broke multiple ribs, punctured a lung, damaged his diaphragm, injured his pancreas and kidneys, and tore his descending aorta.
Doctors cut him open “armpit to armpit, down the middle just like a turkey,” removed his spleen, placed a stent the “size of a garden hose” in his heart to stop the bleeding, resuscitated him multiple times and put him in a medically induced coma for two months.
“I don’t regret it at all,” Engel said. “I’d go back and do it again if I could.”
Engel has done around 60 jumps since his first tandem jump a decade ago. Now, only two things stand in his way from skydiving again: the physical impact of another fall would “split him open like a ripe tomato,” and if that didn’t kill him, his wife would.
“The adrenaline rush is why people want to come in the first time, and then for those of us that continue, I think it’s the freedom of being able to fly,” said Gabriella Sanguedolce, skydiver and Finger Lakes Skydivers employee who oversees about 500 tandem jumps per season. “We’re not just falling; we’re actually really maneuverable, more maneuverable in some ways than birds. We can fly backwards, on our heads, on our back…any position you want.”
What all-encompasses an extreme sport is unclear, said Craig Paiement, assistant professor and chair of the sport management and media department. He prefers to call them “niche sports,” as they are often “individual events” derived from traditional sports.
Extreme sports are “activities requiring high level training, personal skills and commitment such as BASE-jumping and rope-free climbing…and those requiring no participant skills or dedication and little prior knowledge of the activity such as commercial rafting and bungee jumping,” Eric Brymer writes in his PhD thesis, “Risk and extreme sports: A phenomenological perspective.”
Paiement adds that another defining characteristic of extreme sports is they’re individualized. Participants can compete in the same event, for example a triathlon, but each individual controls his or her experience.
People who participate in extreme sports tend to have certain personality traits said Paeiment, who also has a doctorate in psychosocial aspects of sports. The most common types are “your basic thrill-seekers,” “Type A personalities,” and “experimental people who literally just want to try any and everything,” he notes.
Likewise, the sociological theory of “edgeworks” explains extreme sports as a social phenomenon where individuals “voluntarily go beyond the edge of control,” Brymer said.
Once an intense sensation is obtained, the participant will continue to seek new thrills to stray from the mundane.
“The charge you get out of it –– the dopamine that gets released –– you get a thrill because triathlons aren’t a fun sport, neither is ultramarathoning,” Paeiment said. “They’re essentially a trial of your will.”
This mentality motivates marathon runners and participants of obstacle course races including the Tough Mudder and Warrior Dash, the world’s largest running series. The 5k mud run is a Red Frog event based in Chicago that began four years ago, and has since spread to 49 locations nationally and internationally in Australia, Europe, Japan and Canada.
“Our first event in 2009 [was] sold out,” Warrior Dash race director and director of sponsorship Alex Yount said. “We capped registration at 2,000 participants. Now, this year, our Illinois race, which is in the same location, we had almost close to 25,000 people at that race.”
In the beginning, the race was male dominated, but the ratio of men to women has more or less evened out, Yount said.
Still, women are considerably less present in selected extreme sports. They constitute 15 percent of skydivers according to the USPA. Those numbers rise to 33 percent of surfers, 40 percent of mountain and rock climbers and windsurfing, according to the 2007 Berkshire Encyclopedia of Extreme Sports.
“Men tend to think ‘harder, faster, stronger’, [and] women tend to think with more determination and tenacity,” Bruce Gottlieb said in a 2010 Runner’s World article. “Especially the kind of woman who tackles ultra endurance events.”
Warrior Dash Races are designed on naturally difficult terrain where man-made challenges like water, fire and mud obstacles are included to “give people the opportunity to really challenge themselves,” Yount said.
“We feel like we one-upped them a little bit with the Iron Dash – the 15-20 miles with 24-26 obstacles race – and it’s a lot more difficult that you’re standard Warrior Dash obstacles,” Yount said.
The future of extreme sports seems promising as people continue to cross the
boundaries of traditional sports.
“It’s one of those things that once you love it, you can’t live without it,” Sanguedolce said.
