The danger to life was not immediately apparent to the ad. "Hunting Meetings of the St. Moritz Hounds" was on March 23, 1984 in the British newspaper "Horse & Hound", between advertising for stable kits and dates for hunting tests. The only thing that was striking was the location of the meeting: Sass Runzöl - a chairlift in the swanky Swiss ski paradise of St. Moritz.
In fact, there was a kind of hunt three days later: two gentlemen in red fox-hunting jackets crashed down the runway with a polystyrene mold. One sat on it, the other clung to the legs on which skis were mounted.
As soon as the audience could adjust the Porsche sunglasses, the next two gentlemen raced behind - in tandem. And then: a couple in a four-poster bed. A tailcoat wearer on a rubber elephant. A tropical island with palm, beach, shark, tourist, crocodile. And a manned cruise missile that hit a whopping 120 km / h before it smashed into a tree in a controlled manner.
Hardly anyone came to the end of the run: The tandem rolled over, the elephant threw off its rider, the island splintered on a snowcat. Fortunately, nobody seriously injured themselves. Only the horse's head was cleanly separated - fortunately only Styrofoam.
The organizer of the race was the English Dangerous Sports Club (DSC). The Oxford students, with the goal of inventing new and risky sports, became the forefathers of extreme sports before the word even existed. The ski race was neither her first action nor her last. And definitely not the most dangerous.
A ski holiday in St. Moritz in 1977 was also the beginning of the club's history. David Kirke had studied psychology and philosophy at Oxford, a young man of well-to-do business: one had servants and drove Rolls-Royce. Kirke loved sport, but detested rules. Just like Chris Baker, whom he met in St. Moritz.
Shopping cart in the ice channel
Baker was an early trailer of hang gliding. As he plunged down the slopes with his rickety dragon, Kirke was fascinated: "A work of art in an infinite setting". He lied, he himself was a hang-glider, so Baker let him start as well. Completely oblivious, Kirke threw herself into the depths - and survived.
Instead of kissing the ground gratefully, Kirke decided to make his life much, much more dangerous. At a bar, they planned another of the many student clubs in Oxford: the Dangerous Sports Club, dedicated to "silly and dangerous things that are fun and annoy bureaucrats," as Baker described in 2013 in "Vanity Fair."
At Oxford, Kirke found like-minded people. Future lawyers, rocket scientists or politicians - they were willing to risk their lives. Just for fun. They even designed a club necktie with a wheelchair symbol.
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Dangerous Sports Club: madness, sport and lots of champagneThe DSC attached great importance to snobbery: sporting events took place in a tuxedo, with a top hat and champagne flute. Some disciplines were just quirky - like the Litter-Croquet 1981 at a tea party of the Dutch ambassador. Four porters dragged the player in a litter to the ball, which he struck out of the window. This was followed by a round of litter tennis.
Most of the sports were more risky, such as going down ice blocks on the Dry Skiing grassy hill or riding on a skateboard to the Pamplona bullrings. In Ireland, they went on a whitewater bed, with a dressing gown and English breakfast.
To broaden the "limits of human experience," DSC member Hugo Spowers, they risked a lot, whether the ice channel race in the shopping cart, hang gliding of volcanoes or parachuting jumps of electricity pylons. "People think we're crazy," Kirke explained. "We believe that they are mad to endure such dull lives."
The first bungee jumps
Often he was the one who set the bar higher when he was about to shoot himself from a 275 meter high cliff by a slingshot, out to sea with a parachute. Many DSC "sports" looked like suicide to outsiders. One of them should even become a trend sport.
On the morning of April 1, 1979, police officers appeared on the approximately one hundred-meter-high Briftol Clifton Suspension Bridge. Two women had alarmed her, her brother Alan Weston planned to kill himself there. Because no one was there, the police drove on and thought it was an April Fool.
Shortly thereafter, a group of young men arrived. In a suit and top hat, one with a champagne bottle in his hand stepped forward and lunged over the railing. A second jumped behind. A third. And fourth. The police came back too late: The four DSC men were already dangling under the bridge, on rubber ropes, with which one otherwise catching jets on aircraft carriers caught. It was the first bungee jumps in the world.
At the idea Chris Baker had the traditional Lianenspringen on the Pacific island Pentecost. There, men plunged from a wooden tower, secured only with lianas tied around their ankles. The engineering students at the DSC calculated their chances of survival with computer models and caught the opinion of some physicians. "They urgently advise us," says Baker.
Which, of course, the Oxford students ignored. "We want to trigger a worldwide wave," Kirke told the Daily Mail after the jump. They did it: they repeated the action from the Golden Gate Bridge in California and the Royal Gorge Bridge in Colorado, bungee jumping became a media sensation. Soon, the DSC marketed the leaps at fairs, at store openings, wherever paid.
Escape from the law
Because money had become a problem. "In fact, every idea cost much more than ever came in," writes DSC photographer Dafydd Jones on his homepage. They tried a Dangerous Sports wine, but drank it themselves. Then, an Australian beer brand paid for Kirke to fly across the English Channel in the inflatable kangaroo and regulate the height by spilling beer. But nobody got rich.
Kirke did not seem to mind. Of business he understood nothing, often argued with sponsors, important to him was the idea. "David always said that we all share the fear of a normal job," says DSC member Alexander Rufus-Isaacs. "Nice student ideal, but you can not fucking live like that." He moved to Los Angeles in the late 1980s and became a highly paid media lawyer.
More and more went: Alan Weston was rocket scientist of the US Air Force, Tim Hunt representative of the left by Andy Warhol Foundation, Phillip Oppenheim even British Minister of Treasury. Others clashed with Kirke because they wanted to make money with the DSC: When Martin Lyster published a book about the club, Kirke, who was planning his own book, complained to Lyster "how the hyenas ripped pieces out of me."
Finally, Kirke stood there without the old friends, without money, without a club. He came to court for credit card fraud, claiming that he was simply too proud to borrow money. Kirke fled from the judiciary. Spowers and Rufus-Isaacs tracked him down in France, where he slept on the floor in an unheated farmhouse. The court found him guilty in 1990. The four and a half months in custody Kirke then called a "deeply enjoyed sabbatical".
The deadly catapult
The club fell into oblivion - until horrific headlines in 2002. Ex-member David Aitkenhead had begun in April 2000 with DSC alumnus Richard Wicks to develop an old club discipline: the catapult-human slinging. Aitkenhead had been catapulted into a river in 1988 for a TV movie and suffered a lung rupture on impact.
That, they found, was arable. With a blide. This largest form of medieval catapult was able to shoot missiles much further with a noose on the limb. Or people, because sometimes she was also used for executions. Margrave Heinrich von Meissen, for example, had hurled a warlike councilor from the Wartburg in 1247.
At a farm in Somerset, Wick and Aitkenhead spent a long time working on an eight-meter-high specimen. During the test, Wicks friend was thrown out of the safety net stretched between telephone poles - and broke the pelvis three times. They put rubber tires under the net.
On November 24, 2002, a group of volunteers wanted to be shot on the farm at 100 kilometers per hour 30 meters through the air. Biochemistry student Kostadin Iliew Jankow, 19, was nicknamed "Dino". He paid 40 pounds for the short flight. Five were ahead of him, with no complications. But Jankow narrowly missed the net, his body hit with a thud on the floor. He died a little later.
Aitkenhead and Wicks were charged with manslaughter. Kirke offered his testimony: This was "an extraordinary example of the right to own experimentation versus social responsibility". He was not invited. Witnesses testified that they had pointed out that those who had been thrown off Jankow were too close to the edge of the net. But in 2004 the acquittal came - for lack of evidence.
The legacy of the DSC was destroyed. Strangely, Kirke made plans to fly from Olympus across the Mediterranean with a 30-meter helium-filled Pegasus. Nobody wanted to finance it anymore. The myth of the sports eccentrics who risked everything against boredom and got away with it had died with Jankow. Death, a theoretical factor all these years, was now quite real.
Kirke had always worked fearlessly before death. But perhaps the opposite was the reason for his actions. "You only have such a short time here and so tiny footprints back," he said in 2004 his drive, as he was planning a Wagner concert on a rock in the middle of the Atlantic. "I just want mys to be bigger than most others."