Russian makes record-breaking BASE jump off Mt Everest (VIDEO)
This photograph taken from an aircraft shows an aerial view of Mount Everest (C) and The Himalayan mountain range, some 140kms (87 miles) north-east of Kathmandu on April 3, 2013, on the 80th anniversary of the first manned flight over Mount Everest, the world’s tallest mountain. This year is the 60th anniversary of the first summit of the 8848-meter peak.
A Russian extreme sports star successfully made a BASE jump off Mt Everest in early May, recording the entire daredevil stunt for posterity.
Sponsored by Red Bull, which has just released the footage, Rozov made his jump from the Chinese side of the mountain, which straddles Nepal.
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Forty-eight-year-old Valery Rozov performed his record jump on the 60th anniversary of the first ascent of Everest by mountain climbing legends Tenzing Norgay and Sir Edmund Hillary.
“Only when I got back home did I see how hard it was for me both physically and psychologically,” said Rozov of the leap, according to Red Bull.
He completed a four day ascent from the Everest base camp to the site of the jump, notes the Telegraph, and attained speeds of over 125 miles per hour as he descended to the Rongbuk glacier — a dive through the air that lasted for nearly a minute.
Rozov has performed over 10,000 BASE jumps and prepared for the leap for two years, wrote USA Today — including a dive from an active volcano in Russia.
BASE jumping is a deceptively simple sport, where extreme athletes jump off all kinds of improbable landscapes and objects, using only a special suit and a parachute to break their speedy fall.