‘It’s More Like a Suicide Than a Sport’

Photographs from Joumana Seif

A minute before he died, Hervé le Gallou stood at the edge of a cliff at Obiou, in the French Alps, with acres of thin air before him. The view that morning, June 23, 2012, was breathtaking: moonscape cliff faces, pocked with snow, that gave way to plateaus of pale grass and ashen rock, then to bottle-green pine forests in the valley below and to mountains beyond.

Le Gallou was wearing a wingsuit, a webbed all-in-one that has transformed base jumping — the sport in which you leap from a fixed object, like a bridge or a cliff — by allowing "pilots" to create long, glissando flights at speeds of 100 m.p.h. or more before pulling their parachutes. Le Gallou once told me that he started base jumping in an attempt to recreate a recurrent childhood dream, of "flying with my arms." Wingsuits, he said, brought him "very close" to this fantasy. Whenever he stood at an exit point, the spot from which you jump, his overriding sensation was not terror but a supersensory alertness. It was the feeling of a fighter pilot rather than of a human cannonball.

"I know exactly what I'm doing," he said. "I just go for pleasure. There is still some stress, some fear, because there is some danger. But I know exactly what I can do. I know where is my limit."

At 51, Le Gallou was a veteran of thousands of base jumps. But he had never flown from the exit point at Obiou before. In order to execute his intended flight, he needed to guide himself away from the cliff face, and then sharply to the right, over a rocky outcrop. For an experienced pilot, this maneuver was relatively straightforward. The next period of the flight, however, was tricky. Le Gallou would need to glide over a long, moderately inclined plateau. In order to do so, it was imperative that he pay attention to what French wingsuit pilots call la finesse: the ratio of forward to downward movement. (To maximize lift and finesse, a pilot needs to find the perfect "angle of attack" — the best position of the wings in relation to the wind.)

If he couldn't maintain an adequate glide in this part of the flight, he had an escape: he could pull his parachute and land on the plateau. This plan would work as long as he made the decision early enough. But if he bailed too late, he would crash before his chute could fill with air. The best case would be the simplest: to fly with "une bonne finesse," continue over the inclined plateau and the pine trees and eventually pull his chute above the valley floor.

On the morning of June 23, the chances of a long, birdlike flight in perfect conditions seemed good. Nonetheless, dark thoughts may have assailed Le Gallou. He was fatigued, short on practice and unhappy with his equipment. The previous day, moreover, he received news that his mother was involved in a car accident in Paris, the latest in a string of misfortunes that had bedeviled his family in recent months.

Dave McDonnell, an English friend of Le Gallou's, said that before he quit base jumping, he used to hear three distinct internal voices at the exit point, which he called "Yes," "Fear" and "No."

"If you're all tuned in, there's 'Yes,' " he said. "On the mediocre days, there are two other voices­. One's 'Fear.' Your body is screaming out at you, 'Don't do this,' because it's dangerous, unnatural. You're there to conquer your fear. But there's another voice that hangs around every now and again, and that's called 'No.' Something's not right. You can never put your finger on it — it could be something in your pack job, or the weather, or the people you're jumping with, or your mind-set. It's just, 'Walk away, don't go jumping today.' The difficulty is trying to discern between 'Fear' and 'No,' because they're both telling you the same thing. 'No' is your sixth sense that's trying to save your life."

Whatever voice Le Gallou heard that morning, he jumped.

Le Gallou was an unremarkable-looking man of medium height, with a slim physique, short brown hair and wide eyes. I met him only once: in January 2009, at a restaurant in Paris. A friend had told me about an astonishing coup that took place months earlier in Dubai, in which Le Gallou and McDonnell walked into the Burj Khalifa skyscraper, then under construction, disguised as engineers. They evaded security, climbed 155 floors on foot and then flung themselves from the top at dawn — thus becoming the first people to base-jump from the tallest building in the world. I wanted Le Gallou himself to tell me about the adventure.

He was a wonderful raconteur. At dinner, he recalled with amusement how he fashioned a fake ID that fooled the tower's lackluster security. It read: "Hervé Le Gallou: Technicien de Base — Spécialiste des Ascenseurs de Descente Rapide" ("Base Technician — Specialist Fast Downward Moving Elevators"). Apparently, nobody asked him about his unusual job title, or why his identification was written in French.

He also described a vivid scene at the top of the Burj. Le Gallou explained that when he was in his late 40s, he began to suffer from night blindness. As a result, he preferred to wait until dawn to jump buildings he infiltrated in the dark. At the exit point, he and McDonnell watched the desert turn from blue to pink as day broke over Dubai. At that moment, Le Gallou later recalled, "you feel everything belongs to you."

Ed Caesar is at work on a book about the quest to run a marathon in under two hours. He has contributed to The Atlantic, British GQ and The Sunday Times Magazine of London.

Editor: Dean Robinson

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