Speedriding
In his latest video, Soul Flyer Fred Fugen once again pushes the limits of what's possible by mixing freefall tricks and speedriding in La Clusaz, France.
Rules are made to be broken and some people are designed to break them as often as possible. This is certainly the case for Fred Fugen, who, after having flirted with a lighthouse and the Pyramid of Khafre in a wingsuit, today offers us an even crazier project. It is, he says, "above all, a tribute to Vince [Reffet] and mixes disciplines, very much in the spirit of the Soul Flyers.”
The idea? Jumping with skis on his feet from an altitude of 6,500m, linking some freefall tricks and landing on a slope for a big speedriding finish. All of that would be a world-first as a combination, but he's adding in another element: dropping in from a chairlift attached to a hot-air balloon. Fugen explains it all below.
A history of harnesses
At the heart of the project, there is, above all, a technical innovation: the MUTANT harness developed by the late Vince Reffet. A discovery that allows us "to transform a classic harness into a speedriding harness by going from a high point to a low point" explains Fugen. “So you find yourself hanging by the pelvis and no longer by the shoulders, and you can ski. Without this technical evolution, we might never have had the idea of doing this."
I flew over the desert with skis on my feet for a month. People looked at us strangely…
The Sky Skiing project isn't new: “We'd imagined doing this with Vince, and we trained to jump with skis and do synchronised manoeuvres back in 2018. Then we continued to practise a little from time to time, but Vince left us in 2020. However, I wanted see it through to the end of the project”. So things restarted a few months ago, in Dubai.
Skiing in Dubai
"As I found myself alone when doing the tricks, I asked my friend and cameraman Vincent Cotte to accompany me on the freefall phase," explains Fugen. In November 2021, the two companions set off for Dubai to perform no fewer than 150 training jumps there, starting from an airplane: “You have to imagine it: I flew over the desert, with skis on my feet, for a month… People looked at us strangely," he laughs.
Once these first jumps had been made, Fred then started training with his wing at the beginning of 2022: “It's 8.2m and really bombs along! But it's a skydiving wing, not a speedriding one. You can speedride with it, but it's not made for that. I had to get used to all the gear by doing all kinds of runs, just to know what I was going to do on D-Day!"
Destination La Clusaz
To bring the project to life, Fugen chose La Clusaz in the Haute-Savoie region of his native France. Why? Above all because the spot is close to his heart: "We lived right next door with Vince and we did a lot of things there…" But that's obviously not all: "The slope and the altitude of the mountain corresponded to what I wanted to do,” he continues. “As the choreography lasts for 45 seconds and sticks with a classic parachute jump at 4,000m, it was necessary to add those 4,000m above the summit that I was going to ride. And the summit of La Clusaz is 2,500m, which brought us to 6,500."
This is the ideal altitude, since above 6,500m, “you need oxygen in free fall. And I wanted to avoid that, because jumping with a mask and bottles is very restrictive. I know this from having done it with Vince for our Skycombo project in 2014…”
When someone told me about the chairlift, I immediately imagined it and thought to myself, 'that would be crazy!'
The big jump
At the beginning of March 2022, four years after his first jumps, Fugen was finally able to realise the dream he'd shared with Vince Reffet. And this was despite “non-optimal snow conditions and a three-month break between the first training sessions and the production," he explains. “But I'm happy and relieved to have been able to put this complex project together with the help of Dino Raffault, the director of the video. In total, we did about 15 jumps in four days to shoot all the plans we had in mind."
Plans which therefore included a first chairlift jump: “This idea came up following a discussion on the somewhat déjà-vu dimension of the helicopter departure. With Vince, we had already imagined going on skis from the back of an airplane, but it had never happened because it was too complicated for many reasons. But when someone told me about the chairlift, I immediately imagined it and thought to myself, 'that would be crazy!'
However, they still had to find a way to suspend the chairlift: “We looked for a helicopter to which we could attach it, but no pilot would accept. So we moved on to a hot air balloon... and it worked very well! I flew for half an hour on a chairlift. I was very well seated. It was very funny, and above all, it's unheard of, at least to my knowledge!"