Shane McConkey

Extreme sports skier

Obituary
Shane McConkey took skiing to the edge until that got a little boring; so he decided to take it over the edge.

Combining his favourite sports – extreme skiing, BASE jumping and "wingsuit" flying – he developed a new, hybrid form of "fun" called Ski BASE, which involves skiing off mountain cliffs or even tall buildings and usually doing a couple of forward or backward flips for the cameras. Needless to say, he carried a parachute and he nicknamed his new sport "scarachuting".

That's how the Canadian-born, naturalised American lived the last few years of his life, and that's how he died. While filming a stunt for Red Bull, one of his sponsors, he skied off a 600-metre cliff on the Sass Pordoi mountain in the Italian Dolomites, wearing a wing suit and intending to glide down into the valley before opening his 'chute. After doing a double backflip, he had to unclip his skis in order to glide, but he could not get one of them off and it turned into a helicopter-like rotor blade, forcing him downward. Friends said he hit the ground before he could deploy his parachute and he is believed to have died instantly, aged 39, leaving a wife and a three-year-old daughter.

Although he was often listed as one of the world's greatest "extreme skiers", McConkey never really liked the term. Instead, he preferred to be called a "free" or "Big Mountain" skier, while his friends, amicably, just called him "deranged", or "gnarly", their term for way beyond extreme.

A skier from an early age, McConkey came to realise that the best virgin snow and the most exciting "lines" were the ones that led to precipices, where going over the edge meant certain death. Already an experienced BASE jumper, one of those who jump off mountains, skyscrapers, bridges or antennae with the safety net of a parachute, he decided to put the two together. He sought out the best snow where no one had ever been, for obvious reasons, then descended at speed. Braking was never an option. He relied on careful study of the terrain, the winds and weather conditions to ensure that he didn't hit the cliff wall on the way down.

"Why not go flying off this cliff wearing a wingsuit?" he said in a TV interview. "You yank your skis off and then just fly away into the distance. You spread your arms out, they become your wings, you tilt your shoulders and just do it."

McConkey was often known in the world of extreme sports as Cliff Huckstable, nothing really to do with Bill Cosby's character in The Cosby Show. It was because, in extreme ski parlance, he "hucked" or jumped off cliffs. The extreme skiing or Ski BASE documentary films he made – including There's Something About McConkey (2000) and Steep (2007) – are revered among his peers and are said to have led to a resurgence of skiing in North America after its partial eclipse by snowboarding.

McConkey used his lifelong experience of powder snow to improve ski design. In 2002, he invented the Volant Spatula, a wide, "reverse camber" and "reverse sidecut" ski that could glide more easily over powder rather than getting stuck, especially when turning. He got the idea while water-skiing and further developed it with the K2 Pontoon model, now popular among extreme skiers.

Shane McConkey was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, on 30 December 1969, an only child. His father, Jim, was one of Canada's top skiers and would go on to be inducted into the Canadian Ski Hall of Fame, but he left his wife and child when Shane was only three. Brought up by his mother, Glenn, McConkey first got the feel for skiing when she carried him down the slopes strapped to her back. He first skied on his own when he was two.

After heading south to the U S, mainly to seek out ski slopes, McConkey briefly went to the University of Colorado, dropped out, delivered pizzas for a spell, but graduated in 1988 from the Burke Mountain Academy in Vermont, the United States' first sports academy, which trains and educates would-be ski racers. It was after watching the classic ski movie Blizzard of AAHHHs that he decided to make skiing his profession in 1995, winning numerous sponsorships. He eventually settled in Olympic Valley, California, where he was an ambassador for the nearby ski resort of Squaw Valley.

He won several national and international extreme skiing titles, including the World Extreme Skiing Championship, the European Freeski championship and the South American Freeskiing Championship. Readers of the sport's influential Powder magazine voted him world skier of the year three times. In 1996, he co-founded the International Free Skiing Association (IFSA).

In 2007, McConkey jumped off the Eiger in Switzerland. The same year, he skied off a ramp on the roof of the Silver Legacy casino hotel in Reno, Nevada, treating the crowd to a couple of flips in what was believed to be the world's first urban Ski BASE jump. Last December, to mark the inauguration of the new, record-breaking Peak 2 Peak cable car between Whistler and Blackcomb mountains in British Columbia, he sky-dived, without skis, from the roof of a gondola into the valley 1400ft below.

Ski-related media and websites around the world were inundated with messages of shock when news of McConkey's death in Italy came through. "It feels like Superman died," wrote one fan.

Death
Yesterday, March 26, 2009, Shane died while skiing in Italy. There are some technical aspects that are left out from this statement, and it does not touch upon the beauty of the Dolomites and the skiing we shared before the accident or Shane's typical shining persona, full of adventure, humor and life experience.

We chose to ski off of a cliff with our wingsuits and fly them away from the cliff wall before opening our parachutes for landing. We skied and hiked off of the Pordoi cable car to a spot Shane had base jumped once before, in the summer. We spent a bunch of time preparing for the jump, building a kicker, helping each other gear up, and finally we were pleased and prepared and went for it.

Shane did a double back flip in perfect McConkey style. As planned, afterwards, he went to release his skis in order to fly away from the wall and safely deploy his parachute. This is where the jump went wrong. He was not able to release either of his skis. He remained focused on releasing them by reaching down towards his bindings. This put him into a spin/tumble/unstable falling style, that may have appeared out of his control, but in reality, Shane was not concerned about flying position or style; just concerned with reaching those skis so that he could get them off and fly or deploy his parachute. He succeeded in releasing both of skis and immediately transitioned into a perfect flying position; then he impacted the snow, and died at that moment.

The whole thing took place in about 12 seconds. Once he released the skis, he was immediately in control of the flight and would have only seen the ground and imminent impact for a tiny fraction of a second before he hit. Shane's parachute did not malfunction; it was never deployed.

—jt Holmes March 27, 2009


 * http://espn.go.com/action/freeskiing/blog?post=4021669