Base jumping accident kills two, including Super Bowl athlete

A weekend BASE jumping accident in a Utah canyon killed two people, one of them an extreme athlete best known for performing on stage with Madonna at the 2012 Super Bowl, authorities said.

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The Grand County, Utah, sheriff's office confirmed that one of the dead was Andy Lewis, an extreme athlete known for feats in BASE jumping, a dangerous sport that involves parachuting toward the ground after jumping from a fixed elevated object, such as a building, a bridge, or a desert cliff overlooking a deep canyon.

In BASE jumping circles, Lewis had a large following and a reputation for pushing the limits - jumping into tighter spaces or deploying his parachute later than his peers would dare, said John McEvoy, a BASE jumping instructor in Twin Falls, Idaho, who has jumped with Lewis.

"He had an incredible level of athleticism and skill developed through years of practice," McEvoy said. "But then he took an incredible amount of risks." Lewis' other sport made him an overnight celebrity, thanks to Madonna.

Lewis was also a prominent figure in the niche sports of slacklining and tricklining, which combine elements of wire walking with aerial acrobatics - sometimes at dangerous heights.

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Lewis went from obscure athlete to celebrity overnight when he appeared on stage at the 2012 Super Bowl halftime show with Madonna. Dressed in a Roman toga, Lewis bounced and performed tricks on his inch-wide trampoline-like line while Madonna sang behind him.

"My phone literally rang to death for three days straight," Lewis said shortly afterward in an appearance on Conan O'Brien's late-night talk show.

First responders were dispatched Sunday after a report of people injured in a BASE jumping attempt in Mineral Bottom, a remote desert area near the Utah-Colorado border, 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 statement. Sheriff's Lt. Al Cymbaluk confirmed to The Associated Press that it was extreme athlete Lewis who died. He said he had no further details about the fatal accident.

BASE jumping is much more dangerous than skydiving. Although there is no official record of BASE jumping deaths, a list compiled by the website BASEaddict.com shows 540 total fatalities worldwide since 1981 - including 30 people killed last year.

Among the high-profile deaths are that of BASE jumper Dean Potter and his climbing partner, Graham Hunt, who died in 2015 during an attempted wingsuit flight in Yosemite National Park, California.

A study focused on BASE jumping in Norway, published in a medical journal in 2007, estimated that BASE jumping carried risks of injury or death five to eight times greater than skydiving.

Lewis openly acknowledged the danger inherent in the sport. "It's weird to think about how many people are dead, because it seems like such a normal thing," Lewis told documentary filmmaker Ella Warnick in an interview published last year.

Lewis was the owner of BASE Jump Moab, a company that offered excursions to inexperienced clients through tandem jumps, in which the client was attached by harness to a guide using the parachute. Sheriff's spokesman Cymbaluk said he did not know whether Lewis and the other dead man were performing a tandem jump.

Double BASE jumping carries additional risk because it traps two people, one of whom usually has no experience, under a single parachute, McEvoy said. But because they involve beginners, these jumps also tend to be the most basic and lowest-risk types.

"Within BASE, it's a very controversial topic," said McEvoy. "There are a lot of people who say it's the stupidest thing in the world and others arguing, 'No, we're giving people the experience of a lifetime."

"No one immediately returned phone, text and Facebook messages left Monday for BASE Jump Moab. Lewis won four consecutive competitive slacklining world championships from 2008 to 2011. Lewis set a Guinness World Record for slackline surfing - swinging his feet from side to side in a rocking motion that mimics surfing - while maintaining balance over Diaoshuilou Falls in China in 2011.

In 2014, he walked on a slackline suspended between two hot air balloons more than 4,000 feet (1,200 meters) above the Nevada desert.

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Source: CNN