Widely considered to be the most exhilarating extreme sport in the world, skydiving is a favourite among the few that have the courage to give it a try. It’s a chance to feel what it’s like to be above everyone else, and to truly live in the moment, even if it’s just for a little while.
Most people will likely never give skydiving a go, seeing it as too risky. But any accidents associated with skydiving are incredibly rare to the point where it’s generally safer than something like driving. For anyone interested in skydiving and everything that it has to offer, these interesting facts can make skydiving more approachable.
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The Older Clubs
Extreme sports are generally associated with the young and adventurous, but there are skydiving clubs that have proven that it’s possible to have fun at any age. In fact, there are skydiving clubs for people in their 50s up to the 90s bracket. These societies have grown more popular around the world, and many of them have their own traditions, such as the one that will drink beer as they are leaping out of the plane. Whatever the age group, it proves that anyone with a thirst for adventure can pursue it no matter how old they are.
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The Most Dives
Some people love to skydive more than others, but perhaps no one likes it more than Jay Stokes. He loves the sport so much that for his 50th birthday, he set a new record for jumping 640 times over the course of 24 hours. He jumped so often that he beat the previous record, which was 534 and was also his record. It wasn’t just a birthday gift for himself, however, as he managed to raise a fair amount of money for the Special Olympics as a part of his new record.
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The First Woman Skydiver
The first woman to skydive was Georgia Broadwick. Nicknamed “Tiny”, Broadwick stood at just 4’1”, and for her 15th birthday she decided to make history by skydiving. She set the record on the 21st of June in 1913, becoming the first woman of all time to parachute out of a plane, which she did over the city of Los Angeles. But Tiny wasn’t done with setting just one record – she would go on to be the first person of all time to freefall skydive, which she was forced to do when her static line became tangled, and she was forced to cut it and instead deploy her parachute manually.
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Vesna Vulovic
While it was not technically a skydive in the traditional sense, it remains a fascinating story, and great to tell friends over dinner or during a few games of NZ mobile pokes. Vesna Vulovic was working as a Serbian flight attendant who was the only survivor of a plane accident. In fact, she would become famous for falling 33,000 feet and surviving, something that no other person has been able to accomplish. Despite her accident, she would eventually return to working at the airline.