Inventors, explorers, athletes, scientists, and mystics of the kinesthetic realm speak on the subject of sport, the environment, creative pursuits, religion, neuroscience, fear, flow, mortality, and discovery – one who walked on the moon, marginal characters who helped to make mountain biking mainstream, a B.A.S.E. jumper, a boulderer, Gidget, and those many others who would harness the power of play for oftentimes transformative ends.
Who invented the bungee jump? What are the limits of human endurance, of speed up a mountain, or survival at sea? How did it all begin? What motivates those who go in search of the unknown? Where will it end, and what's the point of it anyway?
"It's the spirit of innovation and anti-conformity and doing things differently," says Alexander Rufus-Isaacs, a founding member of England's Dangerous Sports Club (an experiment in weird adventures and alternative sporting events). "A manifestation of joy," "a Don Quixote adventure," "the most exhilarating moment that you'll ever feel in your life," and "a great step into the unknown," according to others.
Genre: SPORTS & RECREATION / General
Perhaps it is the distorted expression of a more primal existence – climbing, running, swimming – something of the nomadic. Or maybe some sort of existential desire to connect. It may be a useless, vestigial impulse; a quest for spiritual awakening through danger, discomfort, and speed. Or a defiant gesture to the natural world that is both nihilistic and naive. Hedonism. Art. Overachievement. Simplicity.
Their points of origin are nearly impossible to indicate. The moments of conception are, for the most part, lost in the flow of space and time – when Polynesian first took board to wave, when native first dropped from the sky by vine. There are, nevertheless, turning points and places in the evolution of any sport – moments of physical clarity. A frontside air off the coping of an abandoned swimming pool, a road bike retrofitted for mountain trails, the first to fly by human power alone. The exploits of individuals and collectives have often been enough to turn trickery up a critical notch before the perpetrators faded into irrelevance, and before the activities they championed took on lives and trajectories of their own.
To relax, they ran across a St. Moritz bar top and dove into a plastic bucket filled with ice water. For stimulation, they skateboarded the Pamplona bull run and threw themselves into the local river by Roman catapult. Calling themselves the Dangerous Sports Club, the tuxedo-clad, champagne-drinking endeavor was conceptualized in a Swiss bar by a pair of Oxford academics who had just discovered hang gliding.
“Awestruck, we realized that someone out there had built something that was so beautiful, so absolutely beyond bureaucracy and so totally dependent on using one’s faculties that it was a work of art within an infinite frame,” said club founder David Kirke of the hang glider epiphany.
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Portuguese
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Translation in progress.
Translated by Roiter Ferreira
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