Tower in Paris, the Space Needle in Seattle, the Christ the Redeemer
statue in Rio de Janeiro, and the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala
Lumpur, Malaysia. If you Google “Jeb and wingsuit,” about a dozen
or so videos will pop up in your search engine including those of
him flying through Tianmen Cave in China and Ball’s Pyramid in
Australia. All are death-defying stunts with wingsuits.
Jeb became famous for doing massive mega stunts with the
wingsuit, especially in China. According to Jeb, when he first went
to China no one knew who he was and wingsuits were such an
oddity that there wasn’t even a word for them. “They actually had to
invent a word for us to explain to the population what we were
doing.” The producers didn’t have high hopes that people would
watch it or care. They thought if 10 million people watched, it
would be great.
The estimates were a little off. Well over 500 million people
watched Jeb’s first stunt live. So many that they had to stop airing it
in parts of the country because people stayed home from work to
see it.
Jeb says he loves extreme sports because they helped him
“find himself.” He started out BASE diving and at the time he felt
lost. “I was one of those 16-year-old kids who didn’t know who I was
or where my place was in the world...I didn’t have a purpose, and
I was suffering from a heavy depression and BASE jumping was
something for me to wrap my life around.”
For Jeb the training involved in BASE jumping gave him
focus and he learned a lot about himself. “I learned that the sport
wasn’t what I thought it was. The sport is a psychological test. It’s
you finding out who you are, it’s finding out what you’re made of,
what you’re capable of, how far you can go before you break. Now,
at 41, I know exactly who I am, and I know exactly what I’m capable
of, and I’d have to say my favorite aspect of the sport was that, the
discovery, the learning about who I was.
“I love activities that force you to get up off the couch and
out in the world to see new things and experience life. For me,
that’s very important. That’s why I like surfing. That’s why I like
climbing. That’s why I like skydiving. That’s why I like BASE jump-
ing. That’s why I like scuba diving. All of these activities have forced
me to travel around the world, meet new and unique, interesting
people and cultures.”
What doesn’t he like about it? Adrenaline. Like many pro-
fessional extreme sports athletes he abhors adrenaline.83 / Sports and Adventure in High Sensation-SeekingDownloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSF Library, on 11 Nov 2019 at 14:19:03, subject to the Cambridge