The infinity tumble is said to be the most difficult move in all of paragliding, an acrobatic somersault in which the guy crazy enough to do it experiences six times the force of gravity. Doing it once is impressive.
Horacio Llorens did it 568 times. In a row.
Llorens, ascending. Photo: John StapelsThe four-time aerobatic paragliding world champ completed 568 loops after jumping from 19,700 feet today, a leap the Spaniard made to celebrate the end of the world. Well, the Mayan prediction of the end of the world, anyway. It is fitting, then, that Llorens made the jump in Guatemala.
“I wanted to take the chance to achieve this feat to mark such a special day and thus recover the world record I had in 2009,” Llorens said in a statement from his sponsor, Red Bull.
Llorens didn’t just break the previous record, set by American Max Marien. He obliterated it, by 194 loops.
“I used oxygen and at 19,300 feet I opened the paraglider and started looping,” he said. “I was looping for around 15 minutes until I had the feeling I was close to the ground so I stopped at around 1,500 feet.”
In an infinity tumble, the pilot goes over the vertical line of the paraglide sail in consecutive loops. Horacio’s cousin invented the move, according to Red Bull, and set the first record in 2006 with 108 loops. The benchmark climbed to 211, and then 281 and then 392.
“I could’ve gone on some more but I was a bit dizzy and couldn’t measure distances properly,” Llorens said. “G forces are very high while doing this so chances are you end up losing the notion of distance and height, something that could be very dangerous. This time, the first 200 loops were the most difficult due to the thin air, a factor that made those loops very aggressive and fast.”
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