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/// Dying
Shane McConkey spent his life
redefining what is possible on skis,
and at age 39, he still went bigger
than everyone else. But when he
died in an over-the-top stunt on
March 26, even devoted fans
wondered: Have extreme athletes
pushed too far?
by bill gifford
the height of
gnarly McConkey
does a double backflip
to reenact The Spy
Who Loved Me’s
opening scene over
Norway’s Innfjorden
in 2007; goofing off in
the air over Tahoe and
near Mount Waddington, B.C. (insets).
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xx m o n t h 2 0 0 9
to Fly///
month 2009
xx m e n ’ s j o u r n a l
T
hat last morning, they rode
the Sass Pordoi cable car to the summit. Deep in the Dolomite Alps of
Italy, Sass Pordoi, at 9,685 feet, is more
for tourists and hikers than for skiers;
its table-like summit is almost completely ringed by cliffs. But Shane
McConkey and JT Holmes had no
interest in marked ski runs. They were
there for the cliffs.
Clipping in, they skated across the plateau and skied down about
300 vertical feet before traversing a slanting ledge. The snow was
firm, verging on icy, so they switched their skis for crampons. It had
snowed during the night, and they had already managed to trigger a
small slab avalanche, which slid away from under them and roared
over the side, falling hundreds of feet. They paused to collect their
wits, then kept going, reaching their destination just before 2 pm.
McConkey had jumped this cliff before, in summer, and ski-BASEing it had been on his to-do list ever since. Now that he was pushing
40, he was checking items off that list as fast as he could.
To gauge the height of the cliff, they threw stones over the side
and timed the drop. Eleven seconds later, Holmes heard one smack
the scree field at the base. They guessed the cliff was about 1,400 feet
tall, maybe more. Holmes remembers that the trees down in the valley looked really small, and he took comfort in that; it suggested they
were high enough to pull off a stunt nobody else but them had ever
done: a combined ski-wingsuit-BASE jump.
McConkey and Holmes would ski down a steep, hanging snowfield
and launch themselves straight off the edge of the cliff; jettisoning
their skis, they would then spread their arms and legs to open a wingsuit, a high-tech fabric garment that would allow them to fly. Steering
the wingsuit with their arms, they would swoop out over the valley
like flying squirrels before finally throwing their chutes to land. Two
camera crews would film the whole thing for Matchstick Productions,
the world’s leading maker of ski movies.
On paper, the stunt sounds insane, but it was something McConkey and Holmes had been carefully developing for years. They had
both done ski-wingsuit-BASE jumps before; JT had pulled one from
a nearby cliff the day before. After sizing up the line and choosing
the best takeoff point, McConkey and Holmes used their avalanche
shovels to pile the thin, windblown snow onto their run-in, building
a small kicker jump at the edge to carry them well clear of the wall.
Finally, at 5:30 pm, the light was perfect for filming. The men
legs so the wingsuit could catch the air. He flew away from the wall
for 15 to 20 seconds before the sharp report of his chute banging open
echoed across the valley and up the cliff. As he dropped to the snow,
Holmes noticed that the trees in the valley really were small, but he
didn’t think much of it; turning, he pointed his helmet cam back up
the cliff, waiting to film his best friend’s jump.
But McConkey never came. Later, when Holmes forced himself
to watch his friend’s helmet-cam footage, he saw exactly what had
happened. McConkey had jumped not long after him and hit the
kicker perfectly. But when he came out of his flips and yanked the
release straps, only his right ski came off; the left one stayed fixed to
his boot. Worse, the right ski had gotten snagged on the left, leaving
both skis attached to his body. As McConkey picked up speed, his
free fall became more unstable. If he threw his chute, it would go
straight up into his skis and get tangled.
But JT could see that even in this desperate situation, Shane didn’t
panic. They had talked about this scenario. Shane calmly, methodically reached down to manually release the binding, working to get
the right ski off as he plummeted to Earth. Finally it popped free:
Both skis flew clear from his body, and McConkey was able to quickly
flip over onto his belly to throw his chute. But he was already nine
seconds into free fall, and the ground was right there, rushing up to
meet him at 110 miles per hour.
I
“When people are passing away on
a monthly basis, you gotta wonder:
Have we gone too far here?” asks
Glen Plake. “Have we gotten to
the point where the human body
doesn’t bounce that good after all?”
tested their bindings one more time, pulling on the release straps
they had designed. Both sets released perfectly. JT radioed the film
crew: all set. “Dropping!” he called, and leaned down the slope, arcing six strong, graceful turns before pointing his skis toward the edge
and launching himself off the kicker into open air.
Holmes turned two quick backflips, then yanked on the straps
that jettisoned his skis, arching his back and spreading his arms and
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pr ev i ous sp rea d, fro m l ef t: yor ick ca rr oux; ei na r engda l ; ja nine hil l ; chri stia n p ondell a
t was fit ting that shane mcconkey went out
with his ski boots on. Whether or not it was inevitable is subject to debate. A once-in-a-generation athlete, McConkey had
not only influenced the way people skied; he actually altered
the skis themselves, first by jump-starting the fat-ski revolution in
the mid-1990s, and then by inventing pontoon-style powder skis,
based on water skis, that are fast becoming standard for soft snow.
In a sport where 60-foot cliff-hucks are now common ski-movie
fare, McConkey was still pushing at the boundaries. Year after year, in
film after film, nobody went bigger than Shane and JT. They were already
the acknowledged masters of ski-BASEing, having skied off the world’s
most spectacular cliffs, from the north face of the Eiger to Norway’s
Trollstigen Wall. It was there that they filmed a shot-for-shot re-creation
of the opening scene of The Spy Who Loved Me, with McConkey as Bond
leaping off the 3,000-foot precipice, pursued by Holmes.
Such exploits cemented McConkey’s iconic status. Best of all, he
was getting paid to live his dream, by Red Bull, K2, and a handful of
other sponsors. Even at 39, with a wife and three-year-old daughter
back in Squaw Valley, he wasn’t ready to give it up.
“You step off the edge, and everything goes away,” an emotional McConkey explained to an interviewer in
early March, days before he died.
“You’re flying now. You’re a bird.”
McConkey was just as well known
for his shaggy, approachable persona,
freckle-faced smile, and sense of humor
apparently on loan from Beavis and
Butthead. He was always playing a joke,
often as his alter ego, Saucer Boy — a
neon-Bogner-jacketed, Jack Daniel’s–
swilling, saucer-riding, ass-grabbing
caricature of, well, Shane McConkey.
Even if you’d never met McConkey, you
felt like you knew him. More than 2,000 people packed his memorial
service at Squaw in April, and countless tribute videos appeared on
YouTube. Online donations poured in for Shane’s widow, Sherry, and
daughter, Ayla. He was mourned in ski towns from Chile to Bulgaria;
one friend, snowboarder Jeremy Jones, christened an unnamed Alaskan peak “Mount McConkey,” and another friend commemorated him
by dropping into one of Shane’s favorite steep runs naked.
superman
returns
clockwi se fr om top left: s cot t gaffney; joann ar ruda/courtesy d ebbie p er kins ; tour def lo.com
McConkey in Tahoe
after skiing Mount
Tallac’s Cross in
1995; relaxing with
Sherry and Ayla in
Mexico in 2007;
swimming with JT
in Norway in 2008
“He was adored,” says filmmaker Scott Gaffney, one of McConkey’s oldest friends. “He was the clown prince of the ski industry.”
In the raw weeks after his death, friends and fans wavered between
sadness and denial. “I keep thinking he’s playing a joke, and he’ll pop
up somewhere,” one close friend said. Death was certainly no stranger
this year to the tight-knit community of Squaw locals: A well-liked
patroller had been killed in a slide, and a promising 21-year-old freestyle star had died in a rare in-bounds avalanche.
It was also a rough time for Red Bull, which had lost another athlete,
Chris Muller, in a 2005 hang-gliding accident as he dove to snatch a
sack of prize money off the ground. Shane’s death made the company’s
slogan — “It gives you wings” — now seem unfortunate at best. And
just one month before McConkey’s accident, Rock Star energy drink–
sponsored motocrosser Jeremy Lusk was killed in a backflip attempt
in Costa Rica (see sidebar, page 93).
Beyond the energy drink world, the death toll among adventure
athletes over the past decade is truly sobering, with a new obituary
appearing every few months. Climbers Todd Skinner and Dan Osman.
Mountaineers Charlie Fowler and Jean Christophe “JC” Lafaille. Swedish adventurer Göran Kropp, who, the year of the Into Thin Air disaster, cycled all the way to Everest Base Camp, summited solo, and rode
his bike home, only to die in a rock-climbing accident six years later.
Then there was big-mountain skier Doug Coombs, who died in a fall
in April 2006, leaving behind a wife and young child.
“Man, I miss Doug Coombs,” McConkey told ESPN the Magazine
in 2007. “When I found out he died doing the same stuff I do, it was
a reality check. I think about him every time I’m in a dangerous situation. It’s a reminder: Be careful.”
McConkey was careful — meticulous to the point of neurotic, friends
say. “Shane’s one of those guys that’s so talented you never expect
something like this to happen,” says Holmes. “He really thinks things
through, and he has so much talent to fall back on. Nobody thinks
Superman can die, you know?”
But when news of McConkey’s death hit the mainstream media,
the reaction was somewhat different: How could he not have died?
And what was the risk taking for? A vicious debate broke out online
between McConkey’s fans and anonymous posters writing things
like, “Sorry, but I don’t feel sorry for him. He HAD to know that
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this sport would kill him someday, he just didn’t know what day.
When you get bored with life and push the envelope, your number
will come up sooner than later.”
But “bored with life” is hardly a phrase friends would use to
describe Shane McConkey. And he was far from reckless: His stunts
were the result of a decade of careful progression, beginning with
skydiving in the late 1990s and including hundreds of BASE jumps,
ski-BASEs, and wingsuit flights, each one carefully logged and
analyzed. Holmes and others say Shane was the first to back out if
conditions weren’t right. He’d whittled the odds down as much as
he could, but the odds caught up with him, as they do in blackjack.
The house always wins.
“My mind goes to the people left behind,” says film director Mark
Obenhaus, who interviewed both McConkey and Coombs for the
documentary Steep. “I saw these guys as heroic in some way; there’s
something amazing and wonderful about what they were doing. But
gosh, there’s been a lot of tragedy.”
Says Glen Plake, whose 1980s ski movies inspired McConkey’s
career: “When people are passing away on a monthly basis, you gotta
wonder: Have we gone too far here? Have we gotten to the point
where the human body doesn’t bounce that good after all?”
“D
ude, this is a real kick to the soul
for me,” Miles Daisher says, looking up from his
Red Bull parachute canopy, which lies bunched
on the floor of his hotel room near Puget Sound.
Normally energetic to the point of hyperactivity — he once BASE
jumped 57 times in 24 hours, setting a world record — Daisher is
somber and subdued. “Shane was my best friend,” he says.
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m e n ’ s j o u r na l
It’s mid-April, barely three weeks after McConkey’s death, and a
few members of the Red Bull skydiving, paragliding, and BASEjumping team — the Red Bull Air Force — have gathered at an airfield
near Renton, Washington, for a few days of intensive free-fall practice.
Shane was supposed to be here too. He was a key member of the
12-flyer-strong Air Force, and arguably the most important: In 1998,
before the Austrian energy drink even went on the market in the U.S.,
he became the first North American athlete Red Bull sponsored.
At the time, McConkey was known primarily as a skier, but he was
beginning to get into BASE jumping. Daisher was living in the Trampoline House, a legendary Squaw ski-bum hangout that was also home
to skier Kent Kreitler and an accomplished young BASE jumper named
Frank Gambalie, who began teaching Miles and Shane his sport.
Though BASE jumping had been around for two decades, it was
still very underground and experimental. Shorthand for “buildings,
antennas, spans, Earth,” BASE jumping boils down to leaping off
cliffs or fixed, tall structures with a parachute. But whereas skydivers could rely on reserve chutes and long-established techniques
from paratroopers, early BASE jumpers were essentially learning by
trial and error — with “error” usually meaning death or serious injury.
Jumpers would get tangled in their lines or caught by winds that
slammed them into the cliff or structure from which they’d just jumped.
As Daisher puts it, “In BASE jumping, you’re constantly doing things
to try and save your life.”
Gambalie was a master; he’d managed to leap off New York’s
Chrysler building, steering his chute between the skyscrapers and
landing on a side street, where he hailed a cab to Brooklyn. That
exploit alone qualified “The Gambler,” as he was known, for immortality. Then in June 1999, after jumping from El Capitan, Gambalie
fled from Yosemite park rangers and drowned in the Merced River.
After Gambalie died, Daisher and McConkey started BASE jumping together, partly as a way to avenge their mentor’s death. McConkey turned into a kind of BASE-jumping evangelist, and together
with Miles staged a “Death Camp” — short for “Plunge to Your Death
Camp” — where they convinced total newbies to fling themselves
off the Perrine Bridge across Idaho’s Snake River Canyon. The first
“campers” were their girlfriends (now wives), Sherry and Nikki,
followed by friends like Scott Gaffney and JT Holmes. They BASE
jumped at their bachelor parties (after doing beer funnels) and
pretty much anytime they had a few hours to spare. McConkey liked
to brag about Death Camp’s “100 percent failure rate,” meaning
nobody had actually died. His sense of humor was like that: ironic,
with a dash of morbid. When friends left to go on dangerous expe-
What’s the
World’s
Deadliest
Adventure
Sport?
skydiving
total
deaths
over the
past five
years,
per 1,000
participants
3.3
ditions, Shane would wag his finger and recite his favorite line from
Dumb and Dumber: “Don’t you go dyin’ on me!”
“He’s just the nicest guy you’ll ever meet,” says Daisher, still speaking of his dead friend in the present tense. “I honestly can’t believe
this happened. As my wife said, the safety bubble just burst. Because
she thought we had a magic bubble around us.”
Perhaps they did. By the time of his death, McConkey had more
than 800 BASE jumps to his credit — a good number of them with
Miles — with only one really close call, in 2003, when he jumped in
bad conditions and slammed into a cliff called the Chief, near Whistler,
as his wife and father watched. He barely managed to save himself by
grabbing a lone pine tree on a ledge halfway down — then pulled out
his cell phone and called Daisher, back in Squaw, for advice.
McConkey also hooked Daisher up with a Red Bull sponsorship,
which completely changed his friend’s life. Up until that point, Daisher
had been something of a dirtbag BASE jumper, living in a tent and
working as a parachute instructor. Red Bull paid him a basic retainer
in the low five figures, plus additional money for appearing at demonstration events and going on Red Bull–sponsored expeditions. The
money wasn’t huge, but it meant that he and Nikki could actually buy
a house in Twin Falls, Idaho, near the BASE-legal Perrine Bridge
— and Miles could devote himself full-time to his passion.
Over the previous six months, Shane and Miles had been on a
BASE binge: They leaped into an enormous natural sinkhole in China;
dropped from the Peak to Peak tram at Whistler; performed at an air
show in Mexico; and wingsuited or BASE jumped off pretty much
every cliff in the spectacular fjordlands of New Zealand’s South Island,
where they spent three weeks this past February — normally the heart
of Shane’s ski season — filming a movie for Red Bull. “We were on
fire,” Daisher says. And Red Bull paid for it all.
R
ed bull is an adventure athlete’s dream
sponsor. From the beginning, it has eschewed the wholesome, Wheaties-box type of jock in favor of a bolder, edgier breed; the company’s burgeoning stable now includes
everyone from Shaun White to surfer Bruce Irons, mountain biker
Jill Kintner, and skiers Daron Rahlves and Chris Davenport, plus a
rowdy posse of skateboarders, BMX vert riders, kayakers, climbers,
motocrossers, and paragliders — all of whom share one common
trait: a total disregard for the law of gravity.
McConkey was Red Bull’s Athlete Zero. Instead of having him sit
in front of cameras and recite some ad agency script, the company paid
him to travel the world to ski and BASE
(continued on page 124)
summiting
k2
104
base
jumping
44
hang
gliding/
paragliding
3.8
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riding
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backcountry
skiing/snowboarding
0.5 0.06 0.05
hart attack
A FATAL
FLIP
In February, a month
Lusk, performing
the backflip in a
competition in
Orlando last October.
He finished third.
chri s tedesco (2)
before McConkey’s
accident, FMX star
Jeremy Lusk attempted
a boundary-pushing
stunt of his own.
even before he climbed onto
his dirt bike at a freestyle motocross
(FMX) exhibition in Costa Rica, something didn’t feel right to Jeremy Lusk. Only
24, Lusk, a husky San Diego kid with a
brown buzz cut, was able to do just about
anything on his 225-pound bike: backflips, tail whips, body extensions in midair. “A next-generation star,” as Wade
Martin, CEO of the Alliance of Action
Sports, described him. “One of the handful of guys driving the sport forward.” Like
his buddies in the Metal Mulisha, a Southern California FMX gang known for its
black garb and smashmouth style, Lusk
projected a hardened image (his nickname: “Pitbull”), despite being a softspoken born-again Christian married to
his high school sweetheart. And with an X
Games gold medal last year and two more
at a contest in Mexico, Lusk was on a roll.
In the locker room at San José’s Ricardo
Saprissa Stadium, Lusk confessed to fellow
rider Myles Richmond that the ramps felt
a little funny. It was so windy the promoters
had erected makeshift barricades to block
the gusts. “He said, ‘It’s just like anything
else — it takes a couple of times to get it
figured out,’ ” Richmond remembers. Then
Lusk donned his helmet and astronaut-style
boots, gunned his engine, and zipped out
onto the field.
Given the conditions, Richmond was
surprised to see his friend attempt a difficult
Hart Attack backflip (named after its pioneer, Carey Hart), in which a rider inverts
his motorcycle in midair, extending his legs
while beneath it. The real trick is returning
to the seat before the bike lands. Richmond
couldn’t see the landing, but when the crowd
roared, he assumed Lusk had pulled it off
— until he saw Lusk’s still body on a stretcher,
one arm dangling off the side, as medics
rushed him to a hospital. He’d hit the ground
headfirst, so hard it pushed his neck back
and split his helmet in two. Lusk died two
days later. “It’s sad to say, but I always felt
someone was gonna die in a big event,” says
Ryan Leyba, a now-retired motocross rider.
“I just never thought it would be Jeremy.”
As in other adventure sports, a deathdefying zero-margin-for-error trick has
become almost a prerequisite for stardom
in FMX. Riders such as Travis Pastrana,
Mike Metzger, and Brian Deegan were already pushing the Hart Attack’s limits, pulling back-to-back flips or 360s that ended
in broken backs and concussions. Even
before Lusk’s accident, the flip was so daunting that many riders would flinch when
asked if they were planning to learn it; some,
like Leyba, quit FMX altogether. “The sport
was going in a direction I didn’t want to
go,” he says. “It’s so unnatural for a dirt bike
to do that.” As former ESPN assistant marketing director Ian Votteri recalls, “The level
of risk was getting gnarlier. The riders were
saying, God, what’s next?”
Richmond remembers a determined
Lusk first nailing the flip on a 2005 trip to
Texas. “It rained, and the ramps were way
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m e n ’ s j o u r na l
too wet,” Richmond recalls. “I didn’t want
to ride, but he gave me a hard time. We
cleaned up the runway so we could practice
flipping. He wanted to do it.”
For the riders aspiring to beat Hart and
Pastrana, the backflip also appealed to their
skinny wallets. Freestyle riders haul their
bikes from contest to contest, hoping to
hobble away with a few thousand dollars.
The bigger the trick, the bigger the prize
— and the better the chance of landing
sponsors. The X-Knights contest in Costa
Rica that claimed Lusk’s life didn’t require
any particular moves, but its $10,000 prize
was enough to get riders to test limits. “If
you’re one of the top guys, you’re in for,
what, five years?” says one action-sports
insider. “It’s critical for them to one-up each
other; that’s where you make the money.
There is no ‘reunion tour’ for these guys.”
Lusk’s death has raised uncomfortable
questions. “Are there safety measures we
can take?” asks X Games senior vicepresident and managing director Rick
Alessandri, who broached the idea of neck
braces. “Maybe.” It’s doubtful a brace would
have saved Lusk. Adds Aaron Cooke of
the Athlete Recovery Fund, a nonprofit
that helps athletes pay medical bills: “It’s
one of those things where the safety gear
has to catch up to the injuries.”
The day after Lusk’s death, Richmond
was flipping at a charity event at a children’s
hospital. “That’s how he’d want us to be,
riding and progressing,” he says. “I try not
to think about it, but, my God, at every
jump, it’s in the back of my head. You just
don’t think anything like this is ever going
to happen.” —david browne
lance continued from page 86
blood booster called CERA. Still, the media
hype over “clean teams” seemed to rankle
Armstrong, as if the subtext was that all others were dirty. Cycling fans have noticed that
he likes to tweak Garmin — wondering aloud
why they are media darlings despite few wins.
He also poached Garmin’s best up-and-coming rider, 18-year-old Taylor Phinney, for his
own developmental team sponsored by Trek/
LiveStrong.
fly continued from page 92
jump with his buddies — including one epic
trip to northern Canada’s Baffin Island in 2001,
where he, Miles, and three other Air Force
members jumped off cliffs a mile high. His
chief responsibility was to make sure he wore
his silver-and-blue Red Bull helmet whenever
the cameras were rolling.
“It’s sort of like having a rich uncle who
thinks these sports are cool,” says Red Bull–
sponsored ice climber and explorer Will Gadd.
Stealing a page from Garmin’s playbook,
Armstrong made great fanfare of introducing
the former UCLA antidoping expert Don Catlin at the press conference where he announced
his comeback. He’d hired Catlin, he said, to
publish his drug test results online. You want
a clean rider? Armstrong appeared to be saying.
I’ll give you pristine.
“I’m going to ride my bike, and I’m going
to spread this [cancer] message around the
world,” he said at the time. “And Don Catlin
can tell you if I am clean or not.”
a lthough a r mst rong h a s n e v er
actually failed a test, it’s unlikely he’ll ever
completely shake the suspicions that he
cheated. He came of age as a rider during a
tawdry era of performance-enhancing drug
abuse in cycling, and several of his former
teammates (Landis, Tyler Hamilton) and rivals
(Jan Ullrich, Ivan Basso) have been sanctioned
for violations. Skeptics wonder how one man,
racing clean, could so consistently outperform
so many who were not. And his critics love to
cite his (since ended) association with Ital-
“But we’d all be doing these things anyway, with
or without Red Bull.”
The “rich uncle” is Dietrich Mateschitz, the
company’s reclusive founder. Mateschitz had
been a marketing executive in the 1980s when
he discovered a Thai energy drink called Krating Daeng; he secured the distribution rights,
tarted it up for Western palates, and proceeded
to create — and dominate — the energy-drink
market. (Red Bull’s 2008 sales topped $4.3 billion.) One way he did that was through savvy,
nontraditional marketing, sponsoring athletes
like McConkey to push the limits of their sports.
The more radical (and dangerous) their exploits,
the more media coverage they would draw —
and the more exposure Red Bull would get.
“If the whole world thought that we were
totally sane and understood the sport we do
the way we understand it, then people wouldn’t
be as interested,” McConkey said in a Fox interview weeks before he died. “And I wouldn’t
get paid to do it. I think it’s great that people
think we’re nuts. It’s on TV right now because
people think it’s nuts.”
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124 j u ly / a u g u s t 2 0 0 9
ian doctor Michele Ferrari, who was charged,
then cleared, of helping riders dope. Over the
years, there have been whispers and straightup allegations — in 2005 the French sports
daily L’Équipe reported that six of Armstrong’s
1999 blood samples tested positive for EPO
— though a subsequent investigation commissioned by the UCI cycling federation took
issue with the testing protocols. Armstrong
was never penalized, though skeptics decried
the investigation as a whitewash.
Given all of this, hiring Catlin seemed like
a shrewd, preemptive strike. And yet, shortly
before the Tour of California in March, his
attention-grabbing partnership with Catlin
quietly dissolved before it ever really began,
bogged down in questions of cost, logistics,
and how much data to make public.
“It became a very consuming event to try
and wire it all up,” Catlin says now. “Finally
we agreed it was too big an undertaking at
that point in time.” He adds: “Lance is a great
guy. If I didn’t have confidence in him, I
wouldn’t have gone as far as I did.”
“We should have vetted that better,” Armstrong says. “Because we had this time at the
Clinton Global Initiative, we rushed it a little.
We probably rushed it a lot, without asking
what is feasible, what it’s going to cost. We
just jumped the gun.”
Considering the program with Catlin was
one of the main tent poles in his comeback,
Armstrong knew he’d get flack for its unravelling. “I figured I’d get zinged,” he says. But he
points out that Astana already had an internal
testing program in
(continued on page 126)
McConkey worked tirelessly developing
new projects for Red Bull, all of his own devising. “Part of our relationship with him was to
say, What ideas do you have?” says one Red Bull
employee who worked with McConkey. “He
would come back with, on paper, the scariestsounding trips ever. But that was Shane.”
The answer from Red Bull was almost
always the same: Go for it. Mateschitz is particularly obsessed with flight — he maintains
an aviation museum in Austria, not far from
Red Bull’s headquarters — and McConkey’s
quest to fly was right up his alley. Just before
his death, McConkey had filmed a TV spot in
which he performs a spectacular ski-BASE,
lands it, and says to the camera, “Welcome to
my world. The world of Red Bull.”
The spot was shelved after he died (“which
sucks, because Shane would be pissed,” the Red
Bull employee says). A famously closemouthed
corporation, Red Bull issued a brief statement
on McConkey’s death, but said little else until
two months later, when the company’s head of
sports marketing, Chris Mater, told Men’s Jour-
nal, “He was a member of our very tight family,
and we were devastated when we heard about
his accident. Working with Shane over the years
was truly inspirational. An innovator that always
followed his own path no matter what, Shane
lived on a different plane, and his enthusiasm
for life was incomparable.”
But not all of McConkey’s sponsors were
quite so enthusiastic about his aerial pursuits.
“To me, frankly, BASE jumping is just the
dumbest, wackiest, most ridiculous thing,” says
Tim Petrick, VP of (continued on page 127)
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global sales for K2 Sports, McConkey’s ski sponsor. “I can’t find the words to describe how much
I think it’s really a bad idea. And Shane got zero
encouragement from us to do those things.”
to be fair, shane mcconkey hardly
needed encouragement; Red Bull helped give
him a comfortable lifestyle and flew him all
over the world, but he would have been jumping off cliffs even if he were still a penniless
ski bum delivering pizzas. Which is pretty
much how his mother, Glenn McConkey, saw
his life playing out after high school, when he
was cut from the U.S. Ski Team because he
was too small.
“It was catastrophic,” his mother remembers. “The biggest thing that ever happened
to Shane was getting dumped by the U.S. Ski
Team. They motivated him, more than anybody
else, to become a well-known skier.”
In the short term, McConkey floundered.
He dropped out of the University of Colorado
at Boulder and jumped to the pro mogul tour
— where he was disqualified from a competition at Vail for throwing a backflip. In protest,
he rode the lift back up and poached the course
naked. When the Vail ski patrol banned him,
McConkey moved back to Squaw.
There weren’t many ways to make a living
by skiing in 1996, so McConkey founded the
International Free Skiers Association, or IFSA
(alternate meaning: “I Fucking Ski Awesome”).
IFSA brought order to the underground world
of extreme skiing by organizing competitions
with judging, rankings, and, most important,
sponsors and prize money. He also helped
launch a magazine called Freeze to publicize
the new free-skiing movement.
McConkey had essentially created his own
dream job, with a simple business model: Sponsors would pay him to use their skis and wear
their jackets; he’d make sure he got into the
right movies and magazines. If he did well in
competitions, great, but the real goal was exposure. “He paved the way for the next generation of skiers to have careers,” says Holmes,
10 years his junior.
By 2001 McConkey was notorious enough
to merit his own movie — something only
extreme-ski legend Scot Schmidt had achieved.
Filmed by his friend Scott Gaffney, There’s
Something About McConkey showcased Shane
in all his dimensions, from mogul-skiing ace
to cliff-hucking mountain ripper to Buster
Keatonesque Saucer Boy. He even threw rad
tricks in the terrain park, showing all the snowboard punks that skiing could be cool.
“I can’t picture him as a racer,” says former
World Cup downhiller Daron Rahlves, who
knew Shane well. “Not that he didn’t have it
in him, but his creativity had a chance to grow
in ways racing gates wouldn’t allow.”
The fat skis are a perfect example. When
they came on the market in the mid-1990s,
fatties were for intermediates and tourists.
Shane saw it differently: The fat skis floated
on top of the snow, like a snowboard, letting
him ski bigger terrain with more confidence
and speed — and fewer turns. McConkey
started using a new line of expert fat skis from
Volant called Chubbs in 1996, and skis have
been getting wider ever since.
A few years later, he was on a lift with Gaffney, who wondered aloud whether you could
ski soft snow on water skis, which were enormously fat and cambered (or curved), the
reverse of snow skis. Shane proved it by mounting bindings to old skis with a water-ski rocker
and shredding a 1,500-foot British Columbia
face for the Matchstick cameras. Soon Volant
came out with another radical product, the
Spatulas: reverse-camber, reverse-sidecut
boards that broke every rule of modern ski
design, yet worked beautifully in soft conditions. Now several companies make reversecamber skis, including McConkey’s sponsor
K2, and their popularity is taking off.
“A lot of people can think outside the box,
have an idea or some sort of epiphany in their
mind,” says Holmes. “But Shane, with his
follow-through, would make it happen.”
Perhaps Shane’s biggest epiphany was that
his two favorite sports, skiing and BASE jumping, could be combined. He had talked about
it for years, while planning and laying the
groundwork, scouting lines and perfecting his
technique. Finally, on January 15, 2003, he
and JT stood atop a well-known rock-climbing
cliff near Tahoe called Lovers Leap. They were
both really nervous, JT remembers, but when
they skied off the edge, their parachutes opened
perfectly and they landed elated.
Others had ski-BASEd before, notably Rick
Sylvester, the stuntman and Squaw legend who
performed Bond’s stunts in The Spy Who Loved
Me. Sylvester made the first recorded ski-BASE
from El Cap in 1972, and since then other daredevils had tried it, but JT and Shane were the
first to incorporate it as a regular element in
their skiing. The parachute let them ski lines
no one had ever tried, precisely because they
ended in giant cliffs. “We realized we could use
a parachute the way ski mountaineers use a
rope,” McConkey explained in March. “We look
at mountains with new goggles now.”
Before long, you almost couldn’t watch a
ski movie without seeing Shane and JT launch
off a cliff — or some other big-mountain skier
who had adopted the technique, like Erik
Roner. But not many athletes had the nerve.
“To keep it interesting, you’ve got to do something more with each jump, to further the
progression,” admits Will Gadd, who tried
BASE jumping but soon abandoned it. “For
me, I could kind of see how it was gonna go.
I thought the timeline was kind of short.”
Having mastered the ski-BASE jump, McConkey was already thinking of ways to up
the ante. In Norway in 2007, while filming the
Bond sequence, Shane and JT tried out something new: the ski-wingsuit-BASE. Here was
a trick nobody else was doing — and looking
back, this might have been a warning sign.
Shane was well aware of the odds: From their
own experience, JT says, they knew that in
one of roughly every 100 BASE jumps, something goes wrong. The history of BASE jumping and skydiving (continued on page 131)
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tells a grim tale, from BASE founder Carl Boenish (died jumping in Norway in 1984) to wingsuit inventor Patrick de Gayardon (died in a
skydiving mishap in Hawaii in 1998). It’s dangerous to be a pioneer.
With the ski-wingsuit-BASE, there was
no one to show them the way, nobody else to
make mistakes for them. They were in truly
uncharted territory, but they weren’t done:
Their mission on that fateful trip to Italy was
to nail the first double-stage ski-BASE, where
they would ski off one cliff, parachute down
and land on a snowfield, then cut away and
drop off another cliff using a second chute
— all in one fluid shot.
As McConkey said in the interview shortly
before he died, “This is exploration for us.”
They were exploring parts of mountains
that had never before been skied, but they were
also pursuing that oldest, most tantalizing,
and most dangerous dream of all: the dream
of human flight.
on the back deck of their modest
cedar-shingled home in Squaw, just around
the corner from the old Trampoline House,
Sherry McConkey swings gently in an old chair
from KT-22, Shane’s favorite lift. Right above
her head is a signature: “Frankie G. III,” their
late friend Frank Gambalie.
Sherry is 41, two years older than her husband, wiry and strong thanks to daily yoga. She
left her native South Africa in 1988 with a backpack and a few hundred dollars, and gravitated
to Tahoe because she loved the outdoors. Mountain biking introduced her to Shane in 1998;
after they got married in Thailand in 2004, their
honeymoon was a three-day trek into the
jungle, where they camped with a primitive
tribe and plucked leeches off each other. “It was
the most awesome experience ever,” she says.
Their dog Pedro, a tubby mutt that Shane
rescued off the beach in Costa Rica and insisted
they bring home, wanders in and out through
the sliding glass door, unsure of what to do
with himself. He studiously ignores the brandnew kitten, Princess, fresh out of the Reno
animal shelter. As Princess climbs fearlessly
up my trouser leg, claws pricking my flesh, I
can’t help wondering if she isn’t connected to
Shane on some reincarnatory level.
After the memorial service, 23 of McConkey’s closest friends pulled off a clandestine
memorial BASE jump from the Squaw Valley
tram — a favorite jump of Shane’s he’d always
hoped to do officially. Every night, a dozen or
more friends show up for dinner, crowding
around the narrow, rustic dining table, telling
stories. Some of them leave with a scoop of
Shane’s ashes, kept in a forged-steel urn made
by a blacksmith friend, to scatter from some
favorite cliff.
Next season K2 is planning to put out a
special edition of the Pontoon skis, with part
of the proceeds going to Sherry and Ayla.
Matchstick has rereleased There’s Something
About McConkey, and Gaffney says the company
also plans to make an updated McConkey
documentary to benefit his family. There is
talk of a memorial photo book from Red Bull,
which paid to fly Shane’s body home, just as
they had funded so many of Shane’s trips over
the past decade.
McConkey hated being away from home,
but his job had him traveling three to four
months of the year. His way of showing remorse was typically backhanded: He set up a
competition he called “King of the Douches”
with a half-dozen athlete-dad friends, including Daisher and Gaffney. At the end of each
month, they had to report how many days
they’d been away. McConkey kept track on a
spreadsheet and crowned the King Douche at
the end of the year. Last year, he beat snowboarder Jeremy Jones by one point.
Another, grimmer bet he called “Last Man
Standing”: A group of guys, athletes all, put
$100 into a pot at the beginning of each year.
The last one left alive keeps the whole thing.
Shane and Sherry had talked about what
they’d do when he was done skiing, making
plans for running steep-skiing camps and
tending the rental properties Shane had
bought years ago, before the market spiked.
“It would have been easy,” Sherry says. But
despite knee surgeries, a dislocated hip, and
other injuries, Shane wasn’t ready to quit. If
anything, ski-BASEing actually extended his
career, sparing his knees and back the hard
impacts off 40-foot cliffs. But it also meant
he couldn’t get life insurance.
Should Shane have slowed down at his
age? Should he have given up his passion because he had a child? Could he have at least
toned it down a little, skipped the ski-wingsuitBASEing? Sherry dismisses the notion outright. “People are constantly asking me how
I ‘let’ Shane do what he did,” she says. “It just
floors me. To me, it would have been like putting an eagle in a cage — a tiny cage.”
She had that in mind when she chose the
quote for Shane’s memorial program, from
Leonardo da Vinci: “Once you have tasted
flight, you will forever walk the Earth with
your eyes turned skyward, for there you have
been and there you will long to return.”
Later in the afternoon, Ayla wakes up from
her nap and walks down the hall, rubbing her
eyes, still in her ballet clothes, blond hair falling across her forehead in bangs as she chases
the kitten around the living room. “I got a
kitty,” she says proudly, finally snaring the
creature. “Her name’s Princess.”
Ayla’s like any three-and-a-half-year-old,
concerned with snacks and books and dancing and toys, living a life of constant discovery
and play. Like her father. She’s already used
to him being away for long periods of time.
Sherry leads me into Shane’s office, which
is cluttered and lined with books: Eat, Pray,
Love next to Ben Franklin’s Fart Proudly. On
a shelf sits a photo of his old dog, Gage, a
malamute who died a year and a half ago. That’s
when Shane and Sherry had to explain the
concept of death to Ayla, which turned out to
be a good thing. Now that Shane is gone, she
knows right where he is. She knows that Daddy
is with Gage now.
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