Base jumpers of the world will gather in Yekaterinburg

The Yekaterinburg administration supported the initiative to hold the Skydiving World Cup from high-rise buildings for landing accuracy in our city on September 23-25, 2015.

The organizing committee of the forum received a letter signed by the Chairman of the Construction Committee of the City Administration, Nikolai Smetanin.

The idea of holding the championship was put forward by the organizing committee of the forum and the Base Jumping Federation. The chairman of the Federation, Ratmir Nagimyanov, a well-known Ural base jumper, expects to involve about 30 people, ten of whom are foreign athletes.

It is suggested to choose the Iset Tower as the jumping object. Now it is necessary to enlist the support of the building owners. If the decision is positive, the competition will go down in history as the first skydiving World Championship from the northernmost skyscraper in the world.

Base jumping is an extreme sport in which skydiving is performed from four types of fixed objects – buildings, antennas, bridges and cliffs.

Despite the fact that base jumping is banned in some countries of the world, jumping from skyscrapers is quite a popular sport. Athletes often climb high-rise buildings and make their risky jump without getting permission from the authorities or the owners of the building. But in some cities such competitions are officially held. Sometimes such events are a kind of advertising campaign to draw attention to high-altitude knowledge. For example, in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), where the Petronas Tower (452 meters) is located, the World Championship in jumping from fixed objects has been held since 2001. Moreover, the country's authorities do not fine jumpers, but rather invite tourists to watch extreme sports.

In 2004, the first international base jumping festival "Moscow BASE Open Air" was held in Moscow. The basers jumped quite legally from the Ostankino TV tower. The annual Skyscraper Jumping World Cup has been held on the Costa Blanca in Benidorm since 2009. The launch pad for skydiving is one of the tallest buildings in Europe, the 52–storey Gran Bali Hotel (186 meters high). Since 2011, Istanbul has been hosting competitions for precision landing in base jumping. Jumps are made from the 240-meter-high Sapphire building.