Sports carry narratives of life and death. Announcers and commentators will often use the concept to dramatize the perils of a team or manager. When your team is down by six and is lined up for fourth and goal, your dad will probably announce, in that way that dads tend to, “This is life and death right here, it’s the season, it’s his career, it’s for all the marbles.” The ball is snapped and the play doesn’t pan out, your team loses. The TV clicks off and your clan of dejected believers shuffles to bed. Life goes on. Life goes on for the athletes, for the fans, and for the sport.
For athletes in the ever-expanding world of extreme sports, the line between life and death is constantly being tested, in a much more tangible way; This line is not constructed of rhetoric as it is in so many other sports. Extreme sports athletes deal with the realities of the world in a way that traditional athletes do not.
Sports such as base-jumping, wingsuiting, and big mountain skiing come as close as humanly possible to the nether space between life and death. Erik Roner, one of the most notable and innovative action sports athletes to date, died on Monday, Sept. 22 while engaging in his dance with death. His death, along with the recent death of Dean Potter, provides a stark reminder of the unpredictable danger of extreme sports and a time to reflect on the lifestyle of an inspirational pioneer.
Roner, 39 at the time of his death, was most well known for his work with Nitro Circus, Travis Pastrana’s band of thrill-seeking goofballs. Roner got his start in extreme sports, and first burst into the national conscious, due to his skiing career. Along with skiing legend Shane McConkey, Roner helped pioneer the sport of ski-basing. The duo began to see that there were skiable lines on big mountains that ended in cliffs.
The only logical solution to skiing those tantalizing lines was to bring a parachute and deploy it once you flew off the edge of the mountain. Footage that Teton Gravity Research re-released on Tuesday show a young, wide-eyed Roner skiing in Alaska in 2006. The clip was from the 2006 TGR film, Tangerine Dreams. In the clip Roner is skiing an impossible looking chute off the side of a gigantic Alaskan cliff. In classic Erik Roner fashion he drops in with little hesitation, carves about four turns, and then points his skies over into the abyss. His body, framed against the massive stone wall, looks incredibly free. He is defying the laws of skiing. In an instant his parachute deploys and he floats to safety.
Ski-basing seems like such an obvious solution when you watch Roner’s videos. It took a mind like Roner’s, however, to actually put into action this revolutionary new form of thrill-seeking. By doing so, Roner pushed the sport of skiing forward, and introduced a new art form into the world of adventure sports. It is bizarre that Roner’s death came during a routine skydiving exhibition at a Squaw Valley golf course.
After having jumped off of hundreds of cliffs in some of the most rugged areas of the world, it was a seemingly normal skydiving exercise that ended his life. There is of course inherent danger in all of the extreme sports that Roner engaged in. A Hunter S. Thompson quote on his website sums up well his approach to life, “Faster, faster, faster until the thrill of speed overcomes the fear of death.”
In his constant quest to push the boundaries of action sports Roner actually survived. It was a routine skydiving exhibition that, in the end, tragically ended his life. Sadly, the quest in the world of extreme sports to continue to push the boundaries of what is possible, will lead to more deaths. It is a fact. Roner pioneered ski-basing and it is only a matter of time until more ways of falling through space will be discovered. Each new innovation will lead to a higher degree of risk-taking and inherent danger.
However, for many athletes similar to Roner, the imminent threat of death simply does not matter. The thrill of hurtling into a world where you can flirt with death, is the only way to live.
While it is certainly tragic that Roner passed away, his insatiable need to push the boundaries of his sport, would most likely have led him there prematurely. Instead of pushing moral judgements onto athletes like Roner it makes more sense to marvel at the human spirit they embody. There is some flame of passion within Roner and others that cannot be extinguished. That is something to be celebrated. Roner had made a conscious choice in his life to listen to the yearnings of his soul.
In TGR’s tribute video for Roner they quote the zany Hunter S. Thompson. “Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a Ride!”
If you watch Roner’s videos it is abundantly clear that he was a man who lived with the singular mission of experiencing the absolute limits of the human body.
By following his passion he inspired thousands, perhaps millions of people, to live their lives in a personal blaze of glory, rocketing towards the grave with reckless abandon.