Discovery Channel Magazine: The Daredevils

Discovery Channel Magazine, September 2014

The tightrope sways and wobbles. Slung between two towers of the Condado Plaza Hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico,10 storeys up above solid pavement, it is shifting in the wind, the guide ropes beneath it insufficient to hold it steady.

The man atop it, balding and wizened, has seen all this before: he is Kurt Wallenda, scion of a legendary family of performers who have been synonymous with daredevillery for the best part of a century. He is 73, and though he uses no safety harness, this moment of drama is barely exceptional for a man who has tried and invented every highwire stunt imaginable.

But something is wrong today. He can’t steady the sway. He tilts has balancing pole sharply to the left, then the right; finally he tries to sit down on the wire. And then he goes over the side, trying and failing to grab the wire as he goes. It’s all on television – everything Wallenda does is on television, he’s a performer, a showman, an artist – and the live commentary from San Juan’s WAPA-TV, in Spanish, rises an octave in concern. Wallenda never wears a harness; he knows it’s over, all the way down 37 metres to the tarmac below. He dies on impact.

It is 1978, a year after Evel Knievel has made his last jump (a failed practice for a leap over a tank of 13 sharks at the Chicago International Amphitheater), and it feels like the end of an era. Previous years in America and Europe have been driven by daring and bravado, whether a madman putting his life at risk on a motorbike or a high wire, or military men doing extraordinary new things just to see if they can be done: to break the sound barrier, to jump out of a balloon from the edge of space, to walk on the moon. But we are entering a new era of health and safety, of laws and regulations; with Knievel’s fading and Wallenda’s death, something remarkable seems to be coming to an end.

To read more, contact me or Discovery Channel Magazine