No.8 Re-wired: Bungy Jumping

I’ll come right out and admit that I have never done it, and further, I am unlikely to ever do it.

The idea of hopping out to the end of a wooden platform with my ankles tied together, tethered to the Earth by a long piece of what is essentially elastic, is both frightening and puzzling. Yet people by the hundreds of thousands – granted, many of them foreigners with little command of English, often drunk and far from the safety of their homes, possibly misconstruing the whole situation and thinking it’s some kind of compulsory initiation ceremony or the only way to get a T-shirt in New Zealand – have paid good money to do it.

The idea of jumping off things is not a new one, nor is the idea of stopping oneself before one gets hurt. Again, like many inventions, it’s not necessarily about coming up with a brand new idea; it can be about taking an existing one and making it work. The natives of Vanuatu have for centuries been jumping off large towers with vines tied around their legs to break their fall. And their legs.

The English apparently had a try of it in the 1980s, but it didn’t last. What this crazy idea needed was a plan to make it less, well, fatal seeming. Alan John (AJ) Hackett (b. 1958) had just such a plan. Hackett was a speed skier from New Zealand who heard of the strange Vanuatuan practice, and saw in it the germ of an idea. With colleague and fellow skier Henry van Asch, he developed the ‘bungy’ – a series of hundreds of strands of latex rubber, bound together into a cord.

The bungy was extensively tested until they felt confident it would do what they wanted. After testing it from a number of bridges across the North Island, Hackett undertook his significant ‘leap of faith’ in Tignes, France, jumping in extreme wind and -20°C temperatures. He knew then that bungy jumping was ready for the mainstream – and set about making it a worldwide phenomenon. One of Hackett’s strong skills, apart from an apparent disregard for his own life, was as a showman.

He’s set a number of Guinness world records, and in June 1987 he ensured that the legend of the ‘crazy Kiwi’ would make bungy jumping a financial success by undertaking a bold move. In the middle of the day, he and a support person snuck up the Eiffel Tower in Paris and d a bungy to the edge. Hackett then jumped off, plummeting down between the tower’s wide steel legs. The deed earned Hackett an arrest by the French gendarmes, but also worldwide publicity, and the respect of thrill seekers everywhere and the French themselves.

Indeed, at the top of the Eiffel Tower today there is a large memorial to Hackett’s feat. ‘Memorial’ is not exactly the right word, but it has a nice ring of mortality that bungy jumping uses as one of its drawcards.

Hackett started the world’s first commercial bungy operation from the Kawarau Bridge over the Shotover River near Queenstown in 1988. It should be pointed out that the safety standards of bungy jumping are extremely high, and this is thanks in no small part to Hackett himself, who pioneered a set of stringent standards (such as ‘the bungy cord must be shorter than the height of the platform’) to ensure that bungy jumping is as safe as any other sport where you throw yourself off something solid and into thin air.

Hackett has also earned a reputation as a shrewd businessman, and has managed to grow what was initially a ‘crazy idea’ into a global empire. In 2012 Hackett and van Asch’s company passed the 25-year milestone, with over 3.5 million people paying $180 each to cheat death and get a DVD of it.

There are now full-time operations in Australia, France, Canada, Macau, Germany and, of course, New Zealand, and a significant set of thrill rides in Russia. But I’m still not going to do it.